KnCurrent is a quartet organized by patrick brennan, the New York-based alto saxophonist and musical explorer. Among his recent projects are a substantial book of his reflections on sound, Ways & Sounds (the book) Audio Edition, available in both print and audio download editions, and the 2023 recording by his quintet patrick brennan sOnic Openings - Tilting Curvaceous (Clean Feed, 2023), previously reviewed on Free Jazz Blog. While Tilting Curvaceous explored brennan’s complex composed cells with a conventional quintet format -- trumpet, piano, bass and drum kit supporting his work -- Kn Current is a radically different conception, setting brennan’s hard-edged, expressionist saxophone amidst a minefield of collectively improvising, amplified strings, with Cooper-Moore, more typically thought of as a pianist, on diddly-bo, On Ka’a Davis on electric guitar and Jason Kao Hwang on electric violin, an ensemble that expands the sonic field into a maze of percussive and electronic strings. brennan’s brief liner note connects the group’s informal architecture to the flexibility of the strings’ electronic resources:
“As much as common practice codifications of pitch & rhythm might enable musical architectures & connections, what about the other sounds, the ones that can’t get so glibly mapped as they fly between the cracks & boundaries? How then to interact with this spectrum if not directly? What combust here is the empathic chemistry among these extraordinarily imaginative musicians.”
A brief word of explanation might clarify Cooper-Moore’s “diddly-bo” and its life beyond the “boundaries”: it’s a bass register string instrument, held horizontally and played either as a plucked instrument or with two sticks, one used to strike the strings percussively, the other employed as a slide, creating glissandi. Fine video examples of his work with the instrument in another remarkable NYC band, guitarist Brandon Seabrook’s trio with drummer Gerald Cleaver, are available on youtube.
While Cooper-Moore still lives partially in the world of acoustic music, Davis and Hwang are often highly electronic here. The group’s startling texture is apparent immediately in the opening “slip apophatica”, beginning with a maelstrom of fluctuating electronic burbles, beeps, whirs and glissandi, a more elusive development of the proto-electronic music of Forbidden Planet, before Brennan enters as an insistently human presence, his saxophone at once convulsive, choked and explosive by turn.
The six tracks that follow are evenly split between longer quartet tracks and shorter works by the strings. The shortest of these is “Dné Wol”, a perfect miniature, little more than a minute long, a solo by Cooper-Moore revelling in the diddly-bo’s bass register, as low as a piano’s but with the pitch-bending, shape shifting, percussive possibilities of an electronically enhanced bass. “micro circus” begins with Davis’s guitar. Already a glittering transforming presence, it’s eventually joined by the wobbling wonder that is the diddly-bo’s unique character and by Hwang’s violin. “Must be ‘Who Say’” is a string trio that begins with Hwang’s sound sufficiently distorted that only the shaping trace of the bow distinguishes it from Davis’s guitar which eventually achieves its own electronic pre-eminence.
A sense of dueting shapes the quartet track “polyneuroreceptive”, propelled initially by brennan’s joyously liberated alto and Cooper-Moore’s propulsive bass lines, gradually adding Davis and Hwang to the mix, the technological transformation of the strings ultimately suggesting not automation but a richer human universe.
á¹£umÅ«d صمود , at 9:22 the longest track, its title Arabic for “steadfast perseverance”, is also the most developed, from Cooper-Moore’s opening compound of sounds, suggesting at once electric bass and microtonal percussion, gradually adding Davis’s highly electronic guitar, then brennan’s twisting, shifting alto explosion, to ultimately conclude with a solo by Hwang in which the violin’s character is genuinely electronic, not merely amplified, extending to eery sounds that are at once electronic and liquid.
The concluding “tewetatewenni:io” embraces a contrasting, near-acoustic dialogue, shifting from the pre-eminence of diddly-bo and warmly vocal, lyric alto to Davis’s subtle guitar lines and the ultimate collective design of the full quartet. It’s a remarkable ultimate transition, the cloak of alien mystery gradually evaporating to reveal a relatively clear and joyous empathy in now near-natural voices. The whole program is a rich and resounding success.
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