By Dan Sorrells
Laura Altman's Holy Trinity takes its name from the Anglican church in Western Australia where it was recorded. It doesn't seem directly concerned with that classic trio of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but as I read the label's notes about the release, they offered up another apt trinity in the context of Altman's solo improvisational practice: instrument, environment, and intervention. I'd like to slightly complicate that last one. Let's say: int(erv)ention, the hazy crossroads of intention and intervention, that wavering boundary between what you put into the world and how the world meets it.
I first encountered Altman's clarinet along with accordionist Monica Brooks and piano-deconstructionist Magda Mayas in the brilliant improvising trio Great Waitress. Altman's solo work shares many of the same concerns: multiple sound sources converging in new timbres, emergent phenomena from the layering of overtones, the use of gaps and silences to emphasize or regather. Rather than responding to bandmates, on Holy Trinity Altman positions her clarinet, voice, and small objects like tin cans in dialogue with more contingent forces—some environmental, some of her own devising—fragile and volatile feedback from a small amplifier, tape interjections from handheld cassette players, reflections and distortions of reverberant space, birdsong in the churchyard.
The starting and ending tracks "Opening Out" and "Turning In" do well to describe the dual aspect of the music, a double movement of eruption and irruption, Altman unfolding her sounds into the receptive room and enfolding those it gives back. She works in pure, swelling tones, often alternating between registers to create slowly pulsing cycles of low and high, pushing into altissimo notes that seem on the cusp of existence and at the edge of control, as frail as the feedback she duets with. Tracks like "A Call to Water" and "The Song I Came to Sing" trouble the boundaries between clarinet or voice or speaker, delicate ecosystems of sound that cloud agency and confound temporal order. This causal erosion seems to float things off into an incorporeal realm of sound-in-itself, and yet there's a forceful grounding element that is always present, a strong feeling of embodiment and place, Altman's inward breaths the caesurae punctuating the overlapping resonances—that palpable, vibrating air within Holy Trinity.
In a remarkably harmonious passage, Barry Blesser once wrote of a clarinet note sounding in a cathedral which could be thought of as "a million bells, each with its own pitch, and each with a slightly different decay rate," the clarinet exciting those reverberating frequencies such that "you are actually hearing the bells of space." As I'm listening to Holy Trinity, I'm hearing Altman's patient exploration, offering and accepting in return, ringing variously the sacred bells of space. This may not be devotional music, but it still feels like an exaltation.
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