ALLMUSIC

As a member of British experimental group Morphogenesis Adam Bohman was no stranger to wayward sound experiments when recording this solo CD. Favoring acoustic sounds over electronic he explores the minute tendrils of sounds coaxed from any number of non-musical instruments. The standout on this Paradigm CD is a cassette piece which the artist made of candid recordings of mundane experiences and conversations, using the stop-start technique to construct a collage of text and environmental sound. Simple but effective, the overall sprit is one of willful experimentation with minimal resources. 4 studio improvisations close this collection with stunning interaction that puts it alongside the best of British avant-garde improv. (Skip Jansen)

AUDION #24 Spring 2000

Certainly a creative talent (proven with his Last orders CD), and as an integral factor in the Morphogenesis sound, Adam also works in a genre that fails to really do anything for me. That genre encompasses this CD. Basically it amounts to an ad-hoc collage of monologue and soundscaping. It's the type of thing Trevor Wishart tried out over two decades ago with his Journey into Space. Although interesting, I was never convinced that that was successful, and I'm not sure about this either. Although 15 tracks, the bulk of this is what seems to be Adam talking into his Walkman recorder saying pretty much whatever comes into his head. Largely the texts involve him describing events relating to Christmas at home with his parents and family, what they had to eat, recipies, going out to the pub, waiting at a railway station, etc.It ends up feeling like a sonic fly-on-the-wall documentary. There's a wit in Adam's monologue, though quite deadpan, yet it's also often spliced up so much that it makes no sense. The recipe bits remind of an old ex-Nurse With wound oddity by Hastings Of Malawi, and there's certainly an air of later Negativland, The Tape Beatles and such like. But why choose such uninteresting subjects? As to the music, there's very little of what most people would call music here, though there are some nice weird noises, sonic fabrics, collages of over amplified sound and the like, though it's all pretty chaotic/haphazard and unfocused. I suppose, in that it's like a TV documentary, maybe it's worth a look-in once. Though, I think I lost the plot somewhere, ending up mind-boggled as to why anyone would release something like this. Though, yet again, maybe some of the foreign electroacoustic music that I like has similar spoken dull subject matter? I wonder if it will improve after repeated listens? (Alan Freeman)

AVANT (November 1999)

I love this CD and can't stop playing it. It works best when I am really pissed off and immediately has me cracking up! It's one of the most quirky low fi, and yet at times thoroughly engaging things I have heard for ages, and makes a great contrast to most of what I usually listen to. A sort of extension of what Tony Hancock might have done if he had developed his arty phase; delivered in the most absurdly uninteresting voice occasionally breaking into a ludicrous kind of David Frost enthusiasm. It's the opposite of the intellectual contemporary 90's composer, the 'serious' composer battling with structure and technique, struggling with powerful computer software and sophisticated electro-acoustics principles, a sort of 'serious piss take' and a real breath of fresh air. But underneath all this humour is a seriousness created precisely because although his methods of description are crude and crass, what he's describing is even crasser!!! Somehow Adam Bohman manages to produce at times a sinister and just as serious work out of the most ludicrous Heath Robinson materials and methods. The front cover is a bit of a deception, for although there is much fascinating music made from springs, wires, utensils and homemade instruments (track 1 Cinders) and instruments playing with reverse tape (track 2 Metal Mushroom), the majority of the CD is made up of the deliciously dry, cynical commentary of Bohman himself, tipped even further into the arena of pure comedy by his naff and even lower-fi portable cassette recorder, that develops worse and worse wow and flutter as time goes by, the monotony of his incredibly boring voice broken only by the shortcomings of the hopelessly inadequate recorder, skipping up and down in frequency as he insists on delivering a seemingly pointless barrage of description about just about anything and everything that seems to come to mind, broken up only occasionally by apparent random but quite brilliant and thoroughly engaging musical interludes. Nowhere is this better illuminated than 'At home' - (and 'At home 2') where he paints in glorious and vivid banal grey shades, a wonderfully drab and ludicrous picture of Xmas and all its hollow joy. Highlighting its shallow materialistic horrors and gross commercialism perfectly, simply by reflecting on all around him. A thoroughly different release that's been a highlight for me so far this year, and I just love the bit where after his mother switches off the Zan Hoffman he's been playing on the stereo he taunts her as to why, and she responds in the most glorious middle class voice 'because it was quite near to sending me mad!' Fabulous!!! (Alan Johnson)

BANANAFISH 14

On the other hand, I could listen to a release like Adam Bohman's 'Music and Words' CD all day. That is, if I wanna have the creeps. For the most part, he makes all the music with percussive instruments and small gadgets - coils, metal rods, wire brushes - and intersperses it with dialogue from his'talking tapes', rare commodities evidently. If you've ever wanted to know David Tibet's piercing secrets or what Blightly lads eat before a long day of extracting rat teeth, step right up. (Roland Woodbe)

NEW YORK PRESS (Dec. 22-28)

In this image hungry culture, I've recently run across a lot of people who have decided to document the events of their lives in sound instead of pictures. One friend of mine took a tape recorder - in lieu of a camera - on a trip to Morocco and recorded a bunch of intriguing sounds. The result was a great audio collage that seemed to do as good a job at documenting the trip as a video camera would have done. Another pal of mine left his video camera at home and instead documented the birth of his son with a tape recorder. He's taken the tape of that first cry and done all sorts of cool loops and audio works with it - he even mixes it into his radio show from time to time. Adam Bohman, the 'objects and surfaces' player for the experimental group Morphogenesis (he rubs various contact-miked surfaces), has made a record that is part audio documentary, part experimental music and part MTV Real World. The disc is an audiologue of Bohman's trip home to England for Christmas. We hear Bohman narrate his boarding of the train to head home after a day at work, arms full of Christmas gifts. Along the ride, he muses about what the holidays are going to be like, ponders the changes that have recently taken place in his family and speculates on what mum's cooking for dinner. It's a choppy affair, with Bohman's voice abstracted by the constant sound of the tape recorder's pause button being turned on and off. He also slurrs his words, which fractures the story even more. Over the course of the disc, small trip vignettes appear in no particular order. At one point we hear him listening to a rock band on the radio. At another, his mother yells at him to turn 'that awful music off,' he yells back at her and so on. Interspersed are Bohman's quiet experimental audio tracks, which serve as musical interludes between his ramblings, effectively breaking up what could be verbal monotony. Over the years, there have been many attempts to create personal audio documentary narratives; the genre's even got a name: 'audio letters.' In 1970, Luc Ferrari released Presque rien No. 1, a kind of musical photography in which he recorded the sounds of a small village in Jugoslavia over the course of a day. The results were then edited into a 21 minute narrative in which no apparent 'musical' sounds were included. The Canadian composer Claude Schryer has travelled around the world with a tape recorder and assembled travelogue documentaries; he's done portraits of various cities solely comprised of his collected sounds edited together in extraordinarily revealing ways. In the spoken word vein, Bohman's roots can be traced back to John Cage's Indeterminacy, where Cage read dozens of one minute stories culled from his life to the sounds of David Tudor's aleatory-derived piano and electronics. Not every attempt has been successful however. Recently a couple of discs were released by filmmaker Jack Smith, featuring his dull stream of consciousness monologues. Thankfully Bohman steers clear of this turf by keeping things open-ended, quirky and funny. Like looking at someone's personal homepage, Bohman's work reveals a lot - maybe more than we ever wanted to know about the artist. But just like verite shows like Cops or 48 Hours are more revealing than anything a sitcom writer could fictionalise, Bohman's sensibility is right on the money. Likewise, as handheld cameras capture life more realistically than steadicams do, so does Bohman's lo-tech handmade approach accurately capture particular moments. (Kenny Goldsmith)

OPPROBRIUM

Second solo CD from Bohman, most immediately recognisable as a member of electronic improv group Morphogenesis. Bohman is also a familiar figure on the London improv circuit, typically to be seen hunched over a table filled with a bewildering array of gadgets and everyday objects (as illustrated in the booklet photo here) from which he methodically extracts sounds, a shock of red hair either side of his pate, looking equal parts obsessive professor and bemused fourth-year geography teacher. He pops up from time to time in the London Improvisers Orchestra, and he and his brother Jonathan have, in the past few years, instigated and run small gig spaces - the now defunct Charteris in north London, and the Bonnington, in south-west London - at which they regularly perform in what is, it has to be said, a rather painful duo, which is in turn frequently augmented with a guest musician. Music And Words contains eight new Bohman constructions: excusing a dull, messy and boring live performance ('In Memoriam E Power Biggs') from 1996, they range from signature Bohman scrape 'n' squeak sound collages ('Cinders', 'Sweepings'), to uncharacteristic and quite fine surprises: frenetic cut-up barrages ('Troops Move Through The Undergrowth', 'Thrice Nightly'), pinging electronics ('Sun Dried') and reverberating drone juxtapositions ('Metal Mushroom', 'Silvaner'). They're separated by seven spoken-word 'At Home' curios: "field recordings" of a Christmas visit to his parents' house and trips around London's nether regions in search of knick-knacks, in which Adam indulges in straight-faced commentary on his activities, matter-of-factly detailing banal quotidian goings-on and reciting found texts (cookbooks, restaurant menus, record sleeves, newspaper articles, etc), tape-speed manipulating them and intercutting them with location recordings of TV, radio, and general street sounds. Though offering few moments of laconic entertainment (and even fewer moments of sonic invention) and serving mainly to drag out the CD and exasperate the listener in the process, they also complement the disc's better moments in oddly honest fashion, in the process providing as comprehensive a portrait of Bohman's aesthetic as you could ever wish to view. To argue that they should have been edited out is to miss the point - this, take it or leave it, is the world of Adam Bohman, presented in something approaching its entirety. By turns delightful, exasperating, baffling, and infuriating; as such, Music And Words is a commendably accurate representation of Adam Bohman's music. (Nick Cain)

RADIO FREE MIDWICH

I’ve struggled with this review for about a month and spilled a lake of Quink in the process. My first reaction to hearing Music & Words was a big sloppy love poem, complete with little hearts drawn to dot any ‘i’s. Then I went the other way and got all WIRE magazine serious (don’t you dare! Ed) explaining how Adam Bohman fits into the UK underground like a lop-sided jigsaw piece (Editor’s note: this album was originally released in 1999 and was reissued in June of this year). In the end I almost fell back on my lazy Bananafish approximation and licked up the mouldy pool of mung with my double tongue-brother. But I guess in these situations I have to fall back to the last refuge of the music guest-blogger, honesty. And it’s with pure, clear honesty I declare Music & Words a phenomenal and brave record. It would be easy to hurl around the words, ‘charming’ or ‘naive’ or perhaps ‘childlike’ but make no mistake…this is weighed with the heavy domestic like grandparents that lived through the horrors of war. We often talk about a musician creating their own language. That’s normally a feat in itself. But it’s own belief system? That’s upper-level creativity of Scott Walker (Tilt onwards) proportions. The first two studio tracks are dandy variations on that ribbed springs and echoplexed gongs caper giving a gamelan electric vibe. ‘Nice music to read to’ I think but gosh…the pages stop turning for good on track three ‘At Home (Sunbury)’ as Adam lists his tea (liver, mashed potatoes and Brussels Sprouts) and explains where he is and what his doing – visiting family for Christmas.

I’ve heard a million sound diaries and sonic art pieces that aim to give a home to vagrant sounds but this, simply and clearly nails you to the spot and I end up staring at the cheap-o stereo like it’s going to sit up and waggle dance. It all reminds me of a Home Counties One Wobbly Egg from Dictaphone flag wavers Fuckin’ Amateurs. The hurly-burly mixture of deadpan voice, rusty metal and blast of radio/TV/tape noise are as comforting as a strong brew and hobnob.

With the scene set ‘Sun dried’ becomes a sour sorbet of Dictaphone/tape recorder jump-cuts and fine tones (Adam’s Pause Pieces). Annoying at first but gradually easing into another diary entry (what Adam calls his Talking Tapes) that leaps into a treatise on preparing fish while The Fall and The Pulp (from John Peel’s festive 50) mung on, self-importantly in the background. Soon I realise…I am listening like an eavesdropper; ear stuck tight to the brassy key hole. And it’s thrilling!

Adam’s obsessions are his food (breakfast, dinner, tea and sundry snacks are described with bored relish) and buttoned up Public Safety instructions that are read with a smirk like a sherried-up uncle. The whole mashy mess is overlaid and underlaid with inappropriate music, clues to set the scene, TV rabble and the occasional violent tape ‘scree’ and crumpled whirr. The editing is a work of genius. Whenever possible words are slurred as the PAUSE and RECORD button are pressed together making the Christmassy fug gin-soaked…even at breakfast. ‘At Home (Red Mullet, the Woodcock of the Sea)’ is the Rosetta Stone of this odyssey with Adam chatting to his mum about biscuits, snatches of church bells, cookery book recitation, tape fuckery and a winter walk to the pub with the interior dialogue of the prodigal son; at times mocking, at time sentimental about his home town. I know this feeling so well having escaped small-town boredom in my teens to discover the thrilling anonymity of the city. Words lurch into the mix: straight into clandestine toilet recordings and the ‘whuuuuush’ of cars speeding by. This breathtaking, dizzying listen comes to a gentle close with Adam lying in bed listening to the wind and rain before we have one quick jerk into Adamworld for a post script chat with mum about Sam/Zam Hoffman. ‘It was quite near to sending me mad’ says mum with a very mad giggle. When the words cease we are left with some tasty scrapings on ‘sweepings’ that seem to four-track the groaning of iron ore and would happily satisfy any deep droner.

But it’s not all tape experiment, ‘In Memoriam E. Power Briggs’ is live in front of a chirpy sounding audience. It feels like an afternoon in a dusty village hall until screwed up snatches of seaside organ get dragged down the A1 all Christian Marclay-like as Pianosaurus jam alongside in a side-car.

The mix of studio, live and Dictaphone pieces are in no way jarring or affected. In fact this has the feel of a compilation tape you might make for a friend’s older brother…keen to impress with your jazz knowledge but really wanting to get your grubby mitts on all them Emerson, Lake and Palmer doubles.

My dream tonight is One Wobbly Egg, Scott Walker & Adam Bohman meeting in Sunbury, outside the Estate Agents or maybe the Magpie Hotel, a fine bottle of red uncorked and breathing. As the vino gushes Adam clangs on the park railings, mumbling his daily diary as One Wobbly Egg skeets FFW blur out of a brace of Dictaphones. After a while, feeling around the sound, Scott drops hot coins in a bucket and adds bleak and dark harmonies. Come on…a Bohman/Walker/Egg trio gotta make the Oto scene eh? (Joe Murray)

RESONANCE (March 2000)

For years, Adam Bohman would be a (or 'the') regular at LMC events in Gloucester Avenue, usually in the front row with a seen-better-days cassette recorder in his lap. In that transformation that happens so often in the improvised music world (and which turns the cliche that the audience is nothing but fellow musicians on its head), the cassette recorder became part of Adam's creative process and he began producing extraordinary tapes and performances. Friends would receive gifts of cassettes - edited live, as it were, inside the machine and complete with the glitches and spikes from the automatic recording level kicking in - of Adam's on-the-spot experiences at 'New Music' festivals, or of Christmas at home. (Is this an organic version of Dogme '95?) Much concerned with food and experimental music, the cassettes were frequently hilarious, but also built their own unique sound world. Paradigm's first release, Variations - A London compilation, contained a text/cassette piece by Bohman. By then he was already known for his work with amplified objects, taking prosaic things and making them magical. His first solo CD Last Orders on Mycophile, presented his non-talking side very nicely. The current CD looks like a leap forward. Beautifully designed by Clive Graham (Bohman's table top collection resembles a work of art - not quite Cornell, but certainly more interesting than Spoerri), it interleaves excerpts from 'talking tapes' with sound pieces and pieces 'arranged' by Graham. (This is an odd phrase for an experimental music record - Nelson Riddle was an arranger. Graham I think is really a co-composer). You can put the spoken material next to Shelley Hirsch's magnificent O Little Town of East New York and Derek Bailey's homemade commentaries on Post Improvisations 1 & 2. The domestic made enchanting. The sound pieces sometimes shrink you to the size of a Borrorer - that lightbulb feels ten feet tall, the spring is what you are standing in. And time can go backwards, thanks to Graham's sound manipulation - see 'Metal Mushroom'. I'm guessing 'Sun Dried' is what Paradigm call a 'pause piece' or a 'rapid collage of prerecorded material, recorded on cassette recorders.' It ranks with BozoMeko Records' cassette-edited Fusion Beats Vol. 2 as an instant earworm I need to hear a lot. (It also seems to feature Sooty on his organ.) 'In Memoriam E. Power Biggs' juxtaposes terrifying organ clusters with some very casual toy piano playing in front of a grateful and amused public at The Vortex, North London. Only flaw - an absence of track numbers or timings. To paraphrase Niles and Frasier, the only thing better than a perfect CD is a perfect CD with one tiny fault. (Steve Beresford)

The SOUND PROJECTOR (7th issue)

Enter the world of Adam Bohman...through a doorway of sound. Another beguiling and baffling record from Paradigm Discs, another in Clive Graham's ongoing projects to present utterly new and unusual listening experiences to the unsuspecting public. The music side is represented by a handful of Bohman's live solo performances, where he makes an eerie range of scrapping, groaning and clattery tinkly noises with his devices. Very little in the way of traditional musical instruments I suspect, judging by the array of interesting junk pictured on the cover here. The ghost of Michael Prime appears on some tapes of him playing the Hammond organ on one very successful track. Both Prime and Bohman are members of the reliably excellent improv-noise-tape combo, Morphogenesis. The words component is the more eccentric aspect to this disc. I guess it amounts to a bunch of semi documentary recordings which are the accumulated detritus from Bohman's hours spent compulsively taping his mental jottings on a hand-held cassette recorder. Through his daily life, he pauses to record observations on his surrounding events. We had a sample of this (the 'Belgian Barrage') on Clive Graham's first 'Variations' compilation. What emerges? Quick shopping list: • Family life - the claustrophobia of a family Christmas. His mum tellingly turning off a tape player because it was near to driving her mad. • Marked interest in food, and the preparation of food. A pre-war recipe for a fruit fool clipped from a newspaper is painstakingly read aloud. • Peripatetic journeys through the drabbest corners of South London, highly reminiscent of my fave films 'London' and 'Robinson in space', both by Patrick Keillor, Bohman has no political agenda whatsoever - he's just observing. Also reminiscent of Viv Stanshall's field recordings, except Bohman doesn't stop to talk to people to garner their opinions on shirts, nor to ask them 'The question'. • A tremendous precision of mind and attension to detail - some of it trivial detail, about what people are wearing, the hour of the day, the precise wording of a rather boring shop sign. Cornell Woolrich wrote his mystery novels this way, and it drove me round the bend. In one of them (Deadline at Dawn) it became essential to reconstruct, through minute trace evidence, the exact movements of a character who had vacated a room two hours ago. Horrible - it brings out the existentialist in me. As to the triviality, Bohman has the honour of nearly becoming Viv Stanshall's neighbour in 'My Pink Half of the Drainpipe' - was it a Tuesday or a Wednesday? This disc is shaping up to be an avant-garde answer record to the Bonzos. • A charming turn of phrase now and then, a passer-by referred to as a 'gentleman' - how many people talk like this any more? The compulsive fascination I'm displaying with this record is probably an aquired taste, but you won't have heard anything like it before. The added bonus is the wobbly sound caused by Bohman's cheap tape recorder running out of battery power, and the disjunctive effects of all the pause button edits...as you'll know this is how some of Captain Beefheart's accapella songs on 'Trout Mask Replica' were put together. As indicated in the sleeve notes, this adds a kind of poor man's musique concrète dimension to the work. One listen and you'll know more about the inner mind of Mr Bohman than perhaps you had bargained for. (Ed Pinsent)

The SUNDAY TIMES (9th January 2000)

The sleeve of 'music and words by' shows the instruments we can expect to hear London improviser Bohman playing: nine springs two lightbulbs, a plastic spoon, a lid and a bradawl. With Morphogenesis, Britain's 'most theoretically rigorous group', Bohman moves these objects about with improbably affecting results; the disconcerting oddness of amplified and treated familiar sounds is juxtaposed with hilariously depressing monologues. 'At home (fishstock or pussy)' is a collage touching on the preparation of a Christmas meal of brains and sweetbreads, Bohman's brother's homemade Turkish delight and the noise of a Salvation Army band playing in the Elmswood shopping centre: the perfect antidote to the Christmas season. If a brush with Bohman leaves you curious, the beautifully packaged Variations 3 is a great introduction to the work of more London-based 'individuals'. (Stewart Lee)

VITAL 184

Adam Bohman is the violinist of Morphogenesis, the much underrated group of electro-acoustic musicians. Here he presents his second solo CD, and to put it bluntly: what the fuck is it about? It starts out all right, with two scraping improvised table top violin pieces - like it is promised from the cover photography. But they don't last very long, and then the difficulty starts. Rambling private letters on cassette, intercepted by 'pause-play' button toys. This is the rest of the CD. Maybe someone wants to call it sound poetry, or a look into somebody's life? I just call it drunk mans talk and a CD that should not have been made... (Frans de Waard)

The WIRE (October 1999)

As a free improviser Adam Bohman has pretty much everything required for the job. He weilds an armoury of soundmaking devices - a disassembled violin, springs, lightbulbs, a barbecue grill, a wire record rack, a wooden box with wires stretched across - and creates a post-serial slipstream of variegated events, where more detail is pressed into a split second than ought to be allowed. 'Troops move through the undergrowth' stuffs beats inside beats like a cross between Roger Turner and drum'n'bass. It is breathtaking. Likewise 'Cinders', which contrasts bell sounds and grating scratches with the listening sense of time and space without which improv. withers. Bohman also tapes audio-letters containing commentaries on his daily life spoken in hilariously lugubrious tones. One way of bottling improvisation is to document a realtime set: the rush of performance confers coherance. Bohman and his producer Clive Graham have decided against that here, instead intercutting his tape diaries with various solo improvisations, so they now sound like 'pieces'. We spend Christmas with Bohman's family in Sunbury-On-Thames, poignant moments while he makes a collage in the kitchen, accepts some home-made Turkish delight from his brother Jonathan, walks to the local pub for a pint, has a pee in the restaurant's toilet (noting the cigarette burns on the white plastic cistern). Bohman's botched recordings - wow and stutter and variable hiss are part of their charm - reveal a DIY Dadaist in the midst of suburban banality, relishing the surrealities of recipies for brain and sweetbreads, menus describing authentic borscht and signs on defunct shops. Tape technology documents a reality James Joyce first accessed with Leopold Bloom's interior monologue. Some of the results are beautiful, but some remain inert and untransformed. Less impressive music ('Silvaner', some chiming on rubbed wine glasses, and the sprawling chaos of 'In Memoriam E. Power Biggs', recorded live at the Vortex) suggests that more editing would have been useful. (Ben Watson)

The WIRE (July 2013)

“Once a certain degree of insight has been reached,” says a character in Samuel Beckett’s novel Murphy, “all men talk, when talk they must, the same tripe.” But in the wake of all the hackneyed opinions, tired arguments and facile judgements, there remains something to be done: finding fresh shapes and stimulating designs to supercede exhausted ideas; discovering unexpected alignments and new configurations within the world we are given. “I have nothing to say and I am saying it,” as John Cage famously put it, adding “and that is poetry as I need it.” The cover of Adam Bohman’s Music And Words, first issued in 1999, displays some of his instruments: a tableau of discarded and disposable objects - detached springs, an empty tin, a wire brush, plastic spoons, a piano hammer, a medicine bottle, a fish shaped jelly mould, wine glasses, an egg slicer, a fucked-up violin. Their sound, amplified, layered or colliding in various improvised combinations, is interspersed with a yeasty mix of prerecorded stuff, some quivering on fouled cassette, plus found text and self-penned journal material, read in Bohman’s inimitable tones. It’s tempting to classify him as a latterday music hall artiste. Or as an eccentric cross between Kurt Schwitters and Hugh Davies, mixing Merz and mirth with quirky inventiveness. But in his wonderfully anarchic creativity, Bohman is his own man, sidestepping the tripe and rustling up the poetry, as he needs it. (Julian Cowley)