By Gregg Miller
Solo percussion, this record has an
energy, an intensity. Icasiano pursues patterns intently, decisively,
relentlessly. Secondary and tertiary vibrations form their own emergent
patterns, depth building up on its own. The gathering of drum sticks,
throwing them to scatter on the concrete floor. Scratch the snare heads;
a low drone from a deep gong (or is that a cymbal heavily dampened?).
Bass drum vibrates and shakes. Heavy mallets rumbles. The confident snare
turns off-kilter, dizzying. The materiality of sound-making integral to
the musicianship—without ever losing forward momentum. The world
coming undone and reborn. A rhythm maze. An impossible logic presents
itself, slowly building in complexity.
The second of two
tunes, “, Derailed,” opens in a tribal, circular manner. Deliberate,
primal, emphatic. About the 2:20 mark, the upper partials are carved off
and we get a multiplication of tom patterns and rim hits which morph
slowly into heavier and then lighter feels. Pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse.
Icasiano is a patient tunesmith, letting the impression develop and
deepen. At 6:30, Icasiano starts shaping frequencies with the eq knob,
shifting us from acoustic to digital and back, and then layering them. By
11 minutes we are in the midst of some high-energy theatrics. Shifting to
ride cymbal tapping which likewise gets the eq treatment, squashing and
filtering the tone to give us a bottom layer over which new cymbal washes
play. Lovely and sonically intriguing, still in the story-telling genre.
I couldn’t repeat the story to you, but the experimentalism is more than
the serial use of techniques. There is an overarching intelligence at
work. The track and the recording closes with another repeated motif,
oceans upon oceans. A beautiful work.
Based in Seattle, I have
been lucky enough to have seen/heard Chris Icasiano play live in many
situations: solo, duo, chamber ensemble, big band. Icasiano is a
co-founding member of the now defunct Racer Sessions (for14 years it was
the premier incubator and gathering space for experimental musicians in
Seattle, long live Racer Sessions), on the Board of Directors of Earshot
Jazz (the principle organization bringing top flight international avant
jazz to Seattle, plus nurturing local talent), a touring drummer with the
Fleet Foxes, and in the drum chair of the sax/drum/effects duo Bad Luck.
It’s a beautiful thing to hear Icasiano solo in this recording, and
because it comes 5 years after the astonishing Provinces, to compare
them.
Icasiano told me that All of it, Derailed is the record he
wanted Provinces (Origin Records, 2020) to be (reviewed here) Listening again to that record and trying to make sense of his comment,
can I hear what he means? First off, the sound of Provinces has more
clarity, but somewhat less feeling than All of it, Derailed. For an avant-experimental
solo percussion record, Provinces is somehow poppy, as if the production
values came out of the 1980s rather than the 1970s. There is a much
greater use of synthetic production: shifting sound blocks produced
through electronic manipulation, the playing of electronic drums (though
of course not exclusively), and the addition of a wide array of synth
textures (listen to “Provinces IV” to get my drift). When acoustic drums
are featured on Provinces, they interact with the synths, such that the
pitches and percussion organize the listening experience into a typical
sonic hierarchy: melody above and percussion as support. To the contrary,
All of it, Derailed is something like a liberation of the drums, where
the drums are the story they are telling at every level. The pitches they
provide are enough, more than enough. The singular unity of rhythm.
It
would appear that the cassettes are sold out (though possibly available
at live performances), but the digital download is available at
Bandcamp:
0 comments:
Post a Comment