Believe - Nature's God (Relative Pitch, 2026)

By Dan Sorrells

A favorite from last year was Spirits of the Dead Are Watching, the debut of Believe, the Sydney-based quartet of Peter Farrar (saxophone), Novak Manojlovic (piano), Clayton Thomas (bass), and Laurence Pike (drums). Believe arrived as a mature working group, having largely negotiated their aesthetic off-tape. There's much care in their improvisations, which convey a particular reverence for the heightened space that opens when people play music together. All of the musicians doubled on small percussion instruments, and even when it got intense, the music had a ceremonial air, the band unafraid of rhythm and repetition, staying with fertile moments and drawing them out like silken filaments. That introduction was often a work of tension or calling-to-attention, and their follow-up, Nature's God —culled from the same 2023 recording sessions—feels more contemplative. It initially did not grab me in the same way, but I'm in its grip now. That first encounter was a victim of my own lack of care.

Listening to Nature's God, one of the first things I noticed—or rather, one of the things that allowed much to escape notice during my initial distracted listen—is the sparse appearance of Farrar's saxophone. On the opening title track, he doesn't pick it up at all. The music develops from hushed notes with a sly and simmering urgency, Pike and Manojlovic goading each other along, the whole thing less a dramatic revelation than the dawning realization that the looming intensity of its namesake is always already present. Setting the saxophone down in favor of percussion reduces the instrumental contrast and further heightens the feeling of a collective sound, particularly in combination with Thomas's often percussive bass playing, striking the strings with mallets or its body with his hands. "Braided River" is a prayer, as beautiful and coherent a thing as free improvisation can produce, the saxophone arising and Thomas and Farrar so close in tone and intent that they're indeed braided into a new, quavering timbre.

With the exception of the almost jazzy centerpiece "First Name Of A Flower" (which works itself into a fairly swinging groove by its midpoint), the pieces on Nature's God further underscore the ritualistic leanings that made Believe's debut so interesting. Small changes accrue but the music remains whole, like an undulating shape. Sometimes this takes the form of repetitive motifs or textures, as in Farrar's long tones and Manojlovic's delicate figures in the aforementioned "Braided River." At other times it is expressed in more explicit rhythm, such as the steadfast beat driving "Earth Does Not Need Us," the axis of a polyrhythmic swirl.

Closing piece "Owls" is daybreak, that transition when the owls have settled and are handing the world back to the day dwellers. Again, no saxophone. The shimmering piano notes hang like dewdrops in a web, and every note, whatever the source, is allowed its full measure. At one point a flare of feedback breaks through, and for some reason I think of sunlight rising through dripping trees, of the moment a ray first strikes your eye and, although it is all so beautiful, you have to look away.

Also, check out the band in full flight on Clayton Thomas's YouTube page: