Goodbye kiss

Four musical farewells

Improv cellist supreme Tom Cora was a central figure in the international new-music scene; when he died last year, he left a hole in its musical and personal heart. Supplementing his cello with pedals and effects that let him mutate its sound and play along with loops of himself, he was a spectacular musician and collaborator. Hallelujah, Anyway: Remembering Tom Cora (Tzadik) is a lovely double-disc farewell from his collaborators and friends, which means it's got a stellar line-up -- the players include the Dutch punk band the Ex (a live track recorded with Cora a few years ago), vocalist Catherine Jauniaux (his wife), guitarist Fred Frith, violinist Iva Bittová, and saxophonist John Zorn, as well as tracks Cora recorded with his own groups, including Curlew and half a dozen others. It's appropriate that Hallelujah is more of a wake than a funeral (there's even a brass-band version of his piece "The Gospel of Gone") and very much in Cora's spirit: celebratory, wry, varied, and perpetually surprising.

Electronic-music pioneer Max Brand's loss isn't felt quite as keenly any more -- he died in 1980, at the age of 84, and most of the contributors to the two-CD In Memoriam Max Brand (Rhiz) hadn't yet started making music then. In fact, he's little enough known now that most of the first disc is devoted to his own work. The central idea of his compositions was to use electronics to enhance other sounds -- radio advertisements, children's songs, "found" recordings -- and turn them into musical art, in the same way that visual art incorporated and enhanced non-artistic artifacts. It wasn't a popular idea at the time, but it's become the bread and butter of a new wave of electronic musicians, particularly the Austrian-based scene that put together In Memoriam, using late-'90s equipment to pay direct homage to Brand's recordings and methods. Radian, Fritz Ostermayer, and Dorninger-Androsch continue his "commercial," "fragment" and "French folk-song" series; others simply make use of his luminous, vibrating analogue tones.

At the opposite end of the art scale, Florida's Harry Pussy pulled off five solid years of sonic terrorism. Their specialty was music that was way more high-concept than it seemed. In the band's final incarnation, Adris Hoyos screamed her head off and attacked the drums with no particular rhythm, and a couple of guitarists (including Bill Orcutt, the group's only other permanent member) played similarly free-form-sounding howls -- but the noise blurts that appeared to be made up on the spot were actually full-on compositions. Their farewell double LP, Let's Build a Pussy (Black Bean & Placenta), is four full sides of a single nerve-shredding drone, with overtones dropping in and out every few minutes -- on the surface, it's an homage to Lou Reed's electronic brain drill Metal Machine Music. But the first 10 seconds reveal that the album's actually a final glimpse back at Harry Pussy's career -- the same kind of look that turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. Hoyos lets out a half-yell, half-cough for a fragment of a second; it's repeated, stretched out twice as long by Orcutt's computer; then it doubles again; then again, this time more than a second long and starting to glisten with overtones; and one last time -- and this time it goes on for exactly an hour, a kiss goodbye turned into a very gradually uncurled middle finger.

Pelt's Empty Bell Ringing in the Sky (VHF) is a drone-based commemoration of a specific moment too, if a much longer one: the (still active) Virginia band's stunning half-hour set at the Terrastock II festival in San Francisco last spring, by all accounts the high point of their career to date. (I was there, hoping that somebody would think to release it.) Expanded to a quintet for the show, and playing sitar, violin, keyboards and bowed guitars, Pelt set up a lush drone that filled the air like ghostly ectoplasm. You can hear their bows crawling across each string and the instruments tentatively extending their tentacles into the current of the piece. That recording appears on the disc as "Empty Bell Ringing in the Sky No. 2"; it's accompanied by a shorter, harsher variation on the same idea recorded with the core trio a week later. There's also a home-recorded rattle-and-drone piece called "Ghost Galaxies" that doesn't have a harmonic center the way the "Empty Bell" recordings do, and a deep-space-station set of scraping noises made with other friends. The Terrastock II piece, though, is the center of the album: the sound of what happened when it all came together, preserved to ring on forever.