Pierre Borel – Katapult (Umlaut Records, 2025)

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos

Pierre Borel, saxophonist and improviser, one of the founders of Umlaut, has decided to endure the difficulty of being a one man orchestra. Here, on Katapult, he takes the physical fatigue of playing live music to reach its limits, by adding percussion to his playing of the saxophone. In addition to all this, his attitude towards the sax, in all of the four tracks that make the bulk of Katapult, is like it is a percussion instrument.

Reading the above lines someone could easily think that this is an album that totally relates and is based on rhythmic analogies. The answer is definitely negative. The whole catalogue of Umlaut records (really worth exploring) is full of recordings that take serious risks in undermining what should, or could, be, on a first level, heard by the listener.

All percussion sounds are made by Borel. Using his mouth and one of his hands as the mediums that create sounds from the wind instrument, all the rest of his limbs struggle to be heard while playing in rhythmic, or even arrhythmic, modes. He moves freely from more complicated textures to easily grasped, by the listener, rhythms, while the saxophone remains the core of his sound palette. It’s like he is reversing the role of the respected instruments: the sax keeps the main “rhythm” (or, maybe, the core idea) of the tracks, while percussion sounds are improvised freely as each track progresses. All this sounds and feels tiring. During listening I felt Borel’s struggle to be heard, an analogy that connects all improvisers in their battle to be visible in the music world and not being marginalized as weird, different or whatever else.

The connections with the minimalism of the avant garde are sonically evident throughout Katapult. At the same time the complexities of drumming (and utilizing also the saxophone as a percussion instrument) are made even more complex. Katapult, which will be out on vinyl, resonates as a modern Janus, engulfing a duality in creating sounds that comes from the limbs of only one musician…

Listen here:

 

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