Studio Toile d’Angles was carved out of a near north Minneapolis lot and erected next door to the home of Milo Fine, Minnesota’s least compromised multi-instrumentalist, composer and instigator of modern music.
Rectangular and sunk in the land, it is maybe 18 x 30 feet; the roof points to high north and descends covered with solar panels toward the south and inside meets a wall ten feet above the floor. A kitchenette and bathroom are in a back corner. No street shoes permitted.
Twenty or so moveable padded chairs, a couch and cushions are set in loose rows seven feet from Cox and his cello. The front row audience is six feet from the end of Fine’s black lacquer Bosendorpher Imperial piano. It is nine feet six inches long and includes nine notes lower than a concert grand’s 88. Debussy, Bartok and Ravel were early adopters. Capable, I am sure, of near-Richter scale waves, Fine’s often emphatic playing still left space for Cox’s bowed, plucked, tapped, and picked cello.
Studio Toile d’Angles’ decor is classic movie theater concrete, replete with horror movie posters.This passion dates from childhood visits with his dad to downtown matinees and Shinder’s book store, Fine explained. It chimes, a bit, with my view when listening to much modern, complicated, unpopular music (stuff falling off the edge of jazz, classic, rock and noise) I do well to think of the pieces as soundtracks. Not exactly programmatic, not storytelling, but scene by scene projections that could reflect or propel visual or narrative perceptions. Fine was interested and mentioned that often soundtracks are too tied to a narrative. Cheap melodrama and bang-crash-howl. I agree. Pride of place at the top of the stairs is the poster for Taxi Driver, the most horror-filled film I know. The score, a master work, is by Bernard Hermann, and was his final production.
I think the performance, a dozen intervals of music with silent breaks between, ran for ninety minutes. The pieces, filled with intricate sounds and connections, percussed, called and responded, had progressions and detours from apparent directions. Melody isn’t an evident priority. The two visited chords and dissonance with nervous momentum.
My body absorbed and mind recognized that the sound of the piano only begins when hammers strike a chord or Fine runs his thumb up and down a section of wires. The curve of the body, an ebony-wood Odalisque, the potent soundboard, the bold thrust of the lid, all send glorious timbres and resonant waves to our ears and into our core and these stick around, stay in the air for many, many and more breaths or until the next notes.
I later told Cox that “with time and attention, in this space, I bet I could learn to tell how your cello sounds with a freshly rosined bow or a worn down, needs help, bow.” He said he had just been telling another fan how very hard it is now to find bow technicians. He taught me that on the horsehair bows each hair is loaded with tiny barbs that roughly or smoothly, draw out differing vibrations on the cello. Huh!
I don’t have a vocabulary to usefully describe the individual pieces of music. Abstract interventions by closely attuned musicians who seek mutual exploration with sounds, rhythms, silences, etc. Bangs, trills, rumbles. Romps, leaps and stutters. Duels and duets.
Have you heard Frank Zappa, Keith Jarrett, Edgard Varese (“music is organized sound”), Cecil Taylor…. Maybe you’ve listened to some sparse Cage or zoomed in on the many dissonances and broken rhythms of Thelonious Monk…. Then you’ll have some preparation for this music. John Zorn’s The Big Gundown, retakes of Morricone’s movie soundtracks, would be an easy path to explore. These familiar melodies are departure points and the music gets very abstract at times but you’ll not get lost. The Big… features many noted players, including on the 2000 reissue, guitarist Derek Baily, who recorded with Fine. Philip Bither of the WAC contributed comments. Jump into the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) where we find other complicated compositions and performances.
Listeners will do well to curtail expectations and preconceptions and to make a commitment to close and sustained listening. I can just about guarantee that you will hate it if you wander into listening without careful attention. A gummy can help.
This difficult music is collectively revelatory and individually sovereign.
Fine said no piece is written or planned but was improvised from moment to moment. Cox pointed out that he and Fine have been practicing improvisation together since the 1970s.
They are sound sculptors, working with differing tools on the same white Carrera blocks and somehow together striking the final blows with impeccable timing, breaking out a unique expression on a disappearing plinth, leaving observers a sense that each offering could easily have become differently-shaped, some other upsetting and beautiful thing.
Titles. None given for anything played last Saturday; that’s too bad. I think Fine’s titles rival Rene Magritte’s painting titles in both their poetry and frequent distance from subject matter. See Magritte titles such as: Empire of Lights, This is Not a Pipe (or The Treachery of Images), The Castle of the Pyrenees, The Great War 1964. Locally, the Dillinger 4 punks come up with great absurd labels for their uncompromising music: Paris Hilton is a Metaphor, Like Sprewells on a Wheelchair, Farts are Like Jazz to Assholes, Let Them Eat Thomas Paine.
Here are some record titles from Fine’s website:
Lucid Anarchists (meat with two potatoes)
Another Outbreak of Iconoclasm (Two Eggs, Slightly Beaten)
Precision in Inexactitude
Surges/Suspensions, Comme Toujours. (Producer: neighbor Michael Mann)
Towards Der Ander Zustand (Another Artistic Triumph)
Sound Carvings, (Ongoing Celebrations of Insignificance)
Nothing Is Not de minimus
It’s harder to listen to this music recorded, even played on good equipment, as the life of the room, the instruments, the musicians, the inventions and audience interactions are compromised in reproduction. But great, great challenges sometimes result in…. So be adventurous. Pay close heed.
Fine has written about his life in music and casts his mind afield into art and philosophy on his website. www.Milofine.com. Order recordings from Shih Shih Wu Ai Records. (Shih Shih Wu Ai: Buddhist principle of "non-obstruction between individual phenomena.” Not to be confused with my hypothetical label: Shishi Odoshi Sounds, relating to a Japanese garden instrument: handmade, water-driven, bamboo cylinders that repeatedly fill, tip and tap out warnings on rocks to scare away boars and deer. Shinto, not Buddhist, I assume, in spirit.)
Fine hosts performances, frequently adding reeds, percussion and more, sometimes with Elaine Evans (our neighbors’ trumpeter daughter), Paul Metzger (her spouse and another musical inventor), Davu Seru, and a long list of local and international players. Get on the concert mailing list.
I will later scramble another mix of observations to more closely respond to Anthony Cox. For the moment, read Ethan (late of The Bad Plus) Iverson’s interview with Cox which touches on the bass and cello player’s early work with Fine as well as his family history, global and neighborhood experiences with both rebels and more tradition-minded jazz greats. Ethan I. & A. Cox
September 9, 2025
Jay Wilkinson
(note: Yes, I may indulge in wandering off subject with this and other appreciations. More so with this one. Write now, cut later.)
Thanks for reading. Comments are appreciated. Other appreciations of live and recorded music (Monk, Dolphy, Fontaines DC, and more are found on this blog.)
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