CRITICS CHOICE 2005

On tenor saxophone Boris Hauf has played hair-raising solos with local prog-punks Lozenge and abstract Braxtonian bebop with vocalist Ruth Weiss; in the electroacoustic quartet Efzeg he sometimes switches to laptop, jumping between fine-grained multiphonics on the horn and piercing drones on the computer. But he always maintains a perfect attunement to context–whether he’s blowing his lungs out over a corkscrewing riff or adding cricketlike chirps to a thicket of sine waves, he plays exactly what the music requires. Though the 30-year-old Austrian, now based in Berlin, has appeared on more than 20 releases in the past ten years, he’s only recently finished his first solo album, Soft Left Onto Westland (Mosz), and it won’t be out until May. On this visit he’s sticking with collaborations: through Sunday at Link’s Hall he and Austrian dancer Sabina Holzer perform Dreamcracker, which explores writer Kathy Acker’s notions about dreaming and identity. Holzer draws on both calisthenics and popular dance moves while Hauf’s iBook accompaniment contrasts bursts of fizzy static and perky sequenced beats with ambient layers of hum and crackle. On Monday at the Empty Bottle he joins local trio TV Pow for a free show, and just about anything could happen: the recent CD 2 (Kuro Neko) by Television Power Electric, a quintet that includes Hauf and two-thirds of the trio, is a collection of minimal, slowly evolving soundscapes, but when Hauf and TV Pow played together last June at Hotti Biscotti, they strummed acoustic guitars and goofed their way through a set of fake folk music. They’ll return from their “Burning Bridges Across America” tour in time to accompany videos by Efzeg member Billy Roisz at the Cultural Center on April 6, and Hauf will also participate in an evening of group improvisation at Lux Gallery on March 31.

–BILL MEYER
March, 2005 CRITIC’s CHOICE

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