By Brian Earley
…the Janus-like aspect of knowledge and cognition must be set against a background fabric of cultural possibility: individuals draw their self-understanding from what is conceptually to hand in historically specific societies or civilizations, a preexisting complex web of linguistic, technological, social, political and institutional constraints.
-Leslie Marsh and Christian Onof, 2007
“Stigmergic Epistemology, Stigmergic Cognition,” Cognitive Systems Research
No matter an individual’s greed, or desire for personal power, each of us works by necessity in collaboration with a larger social fabric. The utopian dream of nonhierarchical social structures may be more scientific fact entangling our actions in constant negotiation with the behaviors of those around us. Stigmergy, or communications and actions mediated with our surrounding environment, serves as a central component of swarm behavior: the phenomenon of starlings swooshing through the sky instantly negotiating each turn with the group so that the birds never collide with one another and form beautiful panoplies of arches and elastic contours.
No matter the political rift, so must human beings abide by the simple truth that we need each other to survive.
The Thunks, a trio assembled of one pianist and two drummers, manifest such coexistence in their recent release Swarm Patterns for Trost Records. On this work Elizabeth Harnik, the brilliantly inventive piano player who spends almost as much time playing the inner strings of the instrument as she does the outer keys, joins her former bandmate from the DEK Trio, drummer Didi Kern (the third member, “K,” is Ken Vandermark), and Martin Brandlmayr, himself a former collaborator with Harnik in the Trio of Mikolaj Trzaska, Harnik, and Brandlmayr.
The music on this album, comprising two long works, “Swarm Patterns I” and Swarm Patterns II,” is rich with energetic, spontaneous group swirling and swarming, but also materializes as extemporaneous or predetermined compositional patterns. Think Cecil Taylor’s concept of unit structures. For example, on “Swarm Patterns I” Harnik and the drummers create at least five distinct motific patterns they return to at various times through the twenty-nine minute work. After some opening swarming Harnik thunks the piano for the first time at 15 seconds and then lifts upwards into swarms of piano washes until developing a three and two note-thunking at the mid-range of the keyboard for the work’s first motif. The three musicians fly off into the stratosphere as a collective soaring Garuda until returning to the established pattern just after the one minute mark.
After five minutes into the piece Harnik is strumming the innards of the piano like a harp before establishing a be-dom-DOM sequence that will soon blend with the first pattern around 6:10 in the work.
This patterning happens over and over again, but so do spontaneously communicated stretches of interplay. At 7:20 atonal space time arrives and soon the drums are scratching on cymbals, followed by a series of tom hits. Stigmergy manifests in one of its clearest moments with a percussive SMACK around 7:50 prompting a strike on the piano strings by Harnik.
The piece alternates between synergistic hushes of silence framed by percussion and a swirling upward frenetic energy that lurches forward. The group attains autonomous, nonhierarchical vitality as tension synchronously builds and falls into quiet, and by the 23:50 mark the group develops its final motific pattern, which it quickly combines and recapitulates with motifs from the beginning and middle of the work.
A humorous piano splatter and a simultaneous drum and cymbal hit end the piece with laughter.
The group dynamics on Swarm Patterns are remarkable, and for some real swarming, check out the first five minutes of “Swarm Patterns II.” All over these works, the three members shift and fly and land and ascend like starlings or stars swirling in an expressionist night sky. But they are not avian creatures or orbs burning in the nether reaches of the cosmos, of course. These are three human beings showing the rest of us the possibility of beauty and harmony when individuals know they need each other to soar and shine.
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