Charlotte Hug

Charlotte Hug & Lucas Niggli - Fulguratio (Fundacja Słuchaj!, 2019) ****½

Charlotte Hug - Son-Icon Music  (Fundacja Słuchaj!, 2019) ****½

By Stuart Broomer

Swiss violist/ singer Charlotte Hug is one of the great soloists of free improvisation, layering dense bowing and extended vocal techniques into performances of shamanic, transformative power. Her brilliance is undoubtedly best experienced live, but it’s clearly apparent on the solo CD Slipway to Galaxies (2011), while her collaborative range can be heard in duos with Frédéric Blondy, on Bouquet, and Fred Lonberg-Holm, on Fine Extensions (all issued by Emanem). These two recent CDs present different dimensions of Hug’s music, one in an improvising duo, the other as composer/ conductor.

While Hug and drummer/ percussionist Lucas Niggli are both residents of Zurich, they had never played together before being invited to perform as a duo at the 2016 Ad Libitum festival in Warsaw. I’m not sure that should come entirely as a surprise, for one might imagine something diametrically opposed in their fundamental approaches. Hug works in large gestures, compounding and layering shapes that are elastic in pitch, using a “soft bow” technique to elaborate walls of shimmering, shifting, sliding harmonics; Niggli is a demon of precision, whether providing orchestral emphasis or polyrhythms. What they share, however, as this performance makes clear from the start, is a rich appreciation of resonance, a luminous continuum in which each drum or bow stroke, each vocal scrape, ignites a response in air. Niggli’s precision extends to the minutiae of sound, playing with details of overtones, sparking, providing ignition.

The titles here are drawn from arcane meteorology with suggestions of alchemy, fundamental mysteries they couldn’t be more apt. There are miracles of interaction in which worlds somehow seem to overlap, as in the convergence of the ultimate “Perlucious,” in which Hug’s scratch/squawk vocal is pure shamanism, Niggli’s inflammatory drumming the flickering insistence of light in the cave. In “Lacunosus,” his drumming complements and highlights the sculped accuracy of Hug’s auto-counterpoint of voice and viola. In contrast to one’s initial questions, the two musicians’ approaches couldn’t be more alike.

On Son-Icon Music, Hug forgoes both her viola and her voice, turning to roles as composer and conductionist. She has worked extensively with “Son-Icons,” her term for graphic scores that mingle notation and gestural painting, sometimes with conduction and video. She’s building on her decade-long membership in the London Improvisers Orchestra, a key group in the development of large-group improvisation. Son-Icon presents two of Hug’s pieces, one for orchestra, one for choir. The results that Hug achieves here are extraordinary creations, works that feel at once through-composed and fluid, achieving great power and mystery.

The orchestra piece, Nachtplasmen, is a 36-minute work performed by the Lucerne Festival Academy in 2011. One is presented with a series of textures that gradually evolve, expanding with the membership of the orchestra; new solo voices appear to initiate new segments. The work begins in an oscillating hurdy gurdy (here a descriptor, not the instrument) of high string harmonics, then gradually follows a three-movement pattern.

The outer movements are conducted; the middle movement leaves the players to their graphic scores and their listening skills. The middle movement has a particularly forceful moment from a cello along with a sustained trumpet passage and some interesting pointillist exchanges among instruments of different orchestral families. At its conclusion, the work achieves a density and power akin to a factory.

It’s a fascinating work, both in the description of its methodology and the music that results, though for this listener there’s also an element of frustration. I want to know the work better, to understand its sources and its individual and collective parts and their relations, what proportional mix is active in its method at any given moment, whether composed, conducted or spontaneous. We read that it’s “made of graphite drawings, which were quite literally created in the tides of the Irish Atlantic; Charlotte Hug assigned an individual Son-Icon to each player…” How did the tides “literally” make them? What is this further element of chance? The illustrations on the CD aren’t associated with one work or the other, but include a spine-like illustration and another that appears to be abstracted, almost blurred, notation.

The fascination and frustration persist with the choir piece “Inn Cammino” performed by the via-nova choir of Munich in 2013. The notes contrast the inspiration of the high mountain streams of Switzerland with the Atlantic tides and indicate that two Son-Icons were given to each singer: one suggesting “the different formations of the inside of the mouth; the second…suggests a spinal form and directs the eye to the system as a whole.” For this listener the overlapping patterns and short rhythmic phrases suggest at times a “parlement of fowles,” or “conference of the birds,” and too, the contrasting movements of different registers can suggest the motion of water over stones, though that may be my own susceptibility to suggestion.

One is grateful for an opportunity to hear these pieces, already a few years old. They’re striking examples of what visual scores, conduction and requisite close listening and looking can achieve. I only wish that the lack of accompanying materials‒the son-icon graphic and video scores themselves, video rather than just audio documentation‒didn’t make me feel like I literally don’t know what I’m talking about.

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Keeping Time with Vasco Trilla

By Eyal Hareuveni

Prolific Catalan (but with strong Portuguese roots) drummer-percussionist-improviser Vasco Trilla has released more than 15 albums since the beginning of 2018, all of which highlight his idiosyncratic conception of time, pulse and space. His recent solo project and collaborations with like-minded improvisers offer insights to his masterful, brilliant work, and his unique ability to transform all objects into percussive machines.

Vasco Trilla - The Torch in My Ear ( Klopotec Records, 2018) ****½

The Torch in My Ear is the third solo percussion album from Trilla, following The Suspended Step(Discordian, 2o16) and The Rainbow Serpent (FMR, 2016). It is titled after the memoir of novelist-playwright Elias Canetti (1905-1994, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1981) and - as the liner notes mention - who wrote elsewhere that “every completely unknown language is a kind of acoustic mask; as soon as one learns it, it becomes a face, understandable and soon familiar”. The information about this album is scarce, the names of percussion instruments and devices are masked, and the cover only informs that it was recorded at Golden Apple Studios in Barcelona, without mentioning the date of recording. 

Trilla structured three extended and multilayered pieces to sound like masks. All seem to conceal their complex vocabularies and syntax, hidden behind its initial, disarming opening sounds. These pieces sound as developing organically, almost like vibrant percussive machine textures, as Trilla described it himself recently. All have similar, disciplined and slow-cooking conceptions of space and time, but all evolve in totally different intriguing manners. The first one, “Acoustic Masks”, offers quiet and distant storms that gently touch and go with their ritualist, meditative sounds. These resonant and enigmatic sounds offer at first rare disarming qualities, but as this piece gains more power and volition these sounds become more invigorating. The second piece, “Unsweep”, also begins with meditative percussive sounds but suggests a different kind of tranquil atmosphere, where echoing sounds float and vibrate gently in space. Soon these ceremonial sounds are disciplined in clear rhythmic patterns, methodically gaining more timbral and rhythmic nuances until this piece morphs into a gentle dance but ends in a tensed note. The last piece, “Solenoid” begins is the most disciplined one. Its minimalist and peaceful spirit sound like an ethereal abstraction of Steve Reich composition.

 

Luis Vicente / Vasco Trilla - A Brighter Side Of Darkness (Clean Feed, 2019) ****

A Brighter Side Of Darkness expands the strategy of The Torch in My Ear to a duo format with frequent collaborator and resourceful improviser, Portuguese trumpeter Luís Vicente, known from the groups Fail Better!, Chamber 4 and Clocks and Clouds. The three extended pieces were recorded at the same location, the Golden Apple Studio in Barcelona on February 2018, and all are characterized by similar ascending motion. These intimate pieces build slowly build from sparse, minimalist and dark sounds and gestures, patiently shaped into dense and complex physical bodies of powerful sounds, but never reach a cathartic phase and suggest a purifying, almost spiritual experience.

The first piece “Untold Stories” begins with distant and subtle resonant sounds and tormented breathes, but Vicente and Trilla methodically sculpt these otherworldly, cryptic sounds as coherent and detailed texture. This dense textures insists on its very own voice and aesthetics - experimental, risk taking and demands repeated, careful listening before it begins to make sense. The second piece, “To Angels and Demons”, offers a much more delicate and minimalist atmosphere, ritualist and contemplative at first but later this atmospheres is channelled into a fragile, still ceremonial yet often melodic and playful texture, but in its very intimate and reserved manner. The last and shortest, “Where You Belong”, is the most tensed and mysterious one, but keeps its intimate, quiet tone as Vicente and Trilla exchange disturbing secrets.

L3 (Luís Vicente/ Yedo Gibson/ Vasco Trilla) (Multikulti Project, 2018) ***½

Brazilian, Portugal-based soprano and tenor sax player Yedo Gibson joins the duo of Vicente and Trilla to form the L3 trio, recorded at Namouche studios, Lisbon on March 2017, as part of Multikulti Project’s Spontaneous Music Tribune Series. Trilla and Gibson have collaborated before and recorded as duo (Inherent Chirality, El Negocito Records, 2015), a trio with double bass player Hernâni Faustino (Chain, No Business, 2017) and quintet with other Portuguese heavyweights - viola player Ernesto Rodrigues, cellist Miguel Mira and guitarist Luís Lopes (Nepenthes Hibrida, Creative Sources, 2017).

Vicente, Gibson and Trilla are fearless and risk-seeking improvisers, masters of extended techniques who enjoy the non-idiomatic, free-improvised act of walking on a thin lines, farthest and higher from any comfort zones of clear rhythmic patterns or harmonious melodies. The interplay of the seven short pieces, totalling in only 33 minutes, is quite eccentric and anarchist, nervous and and tense, sometimes even conflictual and totally manic. L3 has developed their own secretive, highly expressive language, with no attempt to sketch coherent or linear textures. Still, these abstract, chaotic textures flow with great focus on detail and radiate irresistible power and imaginative beauty.

Yedo Gibson / Vasco Trilla - Antenna (Multikulti Project, 2018) ****

The second duo album from Gibson, who appears here on the baritone and soprano saxes and the Serbian flute frula, with Trilla was recorded at Scratch Built Studio in Lisbon on June 2016, again, as part of Multikulti Project’s Spontaneous Music Tribune Series. Gibson and Trilla cement their strong kinship on Antenna, playing as one. Both echo the common description of the two-person edition of Spontaneous Music Ensemble - late British drummer John Stevens and sax player Trevor Watts - who played “as if they were one body”. Trilla expands this description and adds: playing free, in a brotherly manner and letting your imagination run free.

The six, free-improvised pieces are energetic, emotional and highly inventive. Trilla always challenges Gibson with surprising, contrasting gestures. He colors Gibson’s trance-like, fiery soprano blows with resonant, ceremonial bells on “Aperture”; takes him to a sensual dance on “Dipole”; punctuate Gibson’s rhythmic breaths and blows on the baritone sax on “Fractal”, first with playful but meditative touches of the cymbals and bells and later with powerful polyrhythmic patterns; mirrors his vibrant soprano calls with resonant metallic sounds on “Whip; plays fast cat-and-mouse games with him on “Array” and suggests a fragile, minimalist drone on the abstract and almost silent “Isotropic”.

Harald Kimmig / Ernesto Rodrigues / Miguel Mira / Guilherme Rodrigues / Alvaro Rosso / Vasco Trilla - Zweige (Creative Sources, 2018) ***½

Trilla joins on Zweige (branches in German) a free-improvised, chamber session with German violinist Harald Kimmig, and fellow Portuguese comrades viola player Ernesto Rodrigues, cellists Miguel Mira and Guilherme Rodrigues with Uruguayan double bass player Alvaro Rosso. The album was recorded at Namouche Studio, Lisbon, in February 2017.

Obviously, the two “Zweige” pieces explore many aspects of extended bowing techniques, including by Trilla himself who bows the cymbals, careful, investigative timbral search and delicate, nuanced interplay. The role of Trilla is crucial in holding together and anchoring these strings-based textures. On the first piece he acts like a shaman that adds subtle, ritualistic bells and other percussive and bowing sounds, contrasting the restless and tensed but minimalist interplay of the strings instruments. The second piece is more energetic, but keeps a minimalist atmosphere. The role of Trilla is more crucial. He now acts as a sorcerer that mirrors with with his delicate, rattling percussive sounds the multilayered, resonant gestures of the strings instruments, keeping these nervous bowed sounds linked together, and channel the stringed commotion into a meditative coda.

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Christian Lillinger’s Open Form For Society - Open Form For Society (Plaist, 2019) *****

By Martin Schray
 
2018 was a very good year for the German drummer Christian Lillinger, both as to music and commercial success. He released an excellent album of his project Grund, as well as Boulez Materialism, a live recording with his quartet consisting of Christopher Dell (vibraphone), Johannes Brecht (electronics) and Jonas Westergaard (bass), and finally Punkt.Vrt.Plastik, his superb piano trio with Katja Draksler (piano) and Petter Eldh (bass). In addition, he founded his own label, Plaist, which enables him to release music without making any compromises.

Open Form For Society, Lillinger’s new album, is like a condensate of his previous projects and it’s also his most ambitious one to date. The band is an ensemble of nine internationally acclaimed musicians - three key instruments (Kaja Draksler, Elias Stemeseder, Antonis Anissegos), three percussionists (Lillinger himself on drums; Christopher Dell and Roland Neffe on vibraphone), two basses (Robert Landfermann, Petter Eldh) and a cello (Lucy Railton) - and enables the music of high plasticity and depth of focus desired by Lillinger. It’s a new kind of chamber music in a sound space that feeds on new classical music, bebop, hiphop, prog-rock, musique concrète, drum'n'bass and improvised music. Basically, this is a recurring approach in Lillinger's music, however it is increasingly used in a percussive approach here (Lucy Railton's cello is the only instrument that is a more melodious one).

If you are a bit familiar with Lillinger’s music you can see its development. In several pieces the principle of sound proliferation as well as its limits are further explored, something that has already been started on Boulez Materialism. Open Form For Society is a collection of shorter pieces that were clearly conceived as a project: The music was created within a fixed period of time, in a defined room (a studio in Hamburg that is usually used for pop and hiphop recordings and which has a lot of vintage equipment, which gives the music a very cool sound) with selected musicians and a sound engineer. A sonic environment was to be created in order to develop, interpret and follow structures which are opened and connected again and again. All this was intended to happen simultaneously.
Lillinger's compositions, on which he’s worked for two years, serve as a musical common ground. Nevertheless, the free, intensive, discursive process in the studio is always in the foreground, the music flows freely despite the given material. The 5-day working process, which all participants spent in the same place, enabled the realization and further development of compositions, sound ideas and concepts. “Nothing was left to arbitrariness, we spent all the money that was at hand. We intended to define a new standard in the mediation of complexity in music between sound membranes (loudspeakers) and listeners“, said Lillinger after the recordings had been completed.

The following pieces can serve as examples: “Piece for Upright and Grand Piano“, the opener, stands in the tradition of new classical music, in which the purely classical approach is alienated by the preparations in one of the pianos. This creates a kind of natural distortion, which is intensified by strong dynamic differences. The rhythmic density, reminiscent of large sound blocks which are shifted and rearranged constantly, becomes obvious in “Aorta“. In this track Elias Stemeseder's synthesizer stands out, it tears up sound patterns like silk shreds, which is another alienation effect. Then, “Thür“ and “Titan“ follow a pointillistic and repetitive approach, in “Thür“ with the pianos and the vibraphone at the beginning, which are processed throughout the piece and strongly diversified further on, so that they almost get lost in the vastness of sound, which is very exciting to follow. These are also recurring motifs in Lillinger's music. Yet, there’s something surprisingly new: In “Basel“ a small melody flashes up, which then becomes rather spooky and almost decently disappears into the orcus. Also, “Sisyphos (CMS)“ is based on a cool jazz riff. The track can almost be considered a small hit, but as soon as the music is on the verge of getting too accessible, it’s alienated by distortions bit by bit. Polyrhythmic structures and melodies meet tricky fat grooves on Open Form For Society; long, extremely virtuoso lines serve as soundscapes through acceleration and deceleration. So, on the one hand, this is a typical Lillinger album.

On the other hand, it’s even more for him. It represents a microcosmic model of society that is said to function as a possible model for society in general. Thus, Karl Popper’s Open Society is deliberately in the name of the project, which focuses on the “critical abilities of man“. Here, this principle is translated into a discursive working process. But even without the philosophical meta-level Open Form For Society is a fascinating, outstanding album.

Christian Lillinger’s Open Form for Society is released on Lillinger's own PLAIST (Edel) label and is available as 180g double vinyl (limited edition), CD and as a digital download.

You can order it directly from the label: https://www.plaist-music.com/releases-1

You can listen to“Thür“ here:

  

You can listen to “KFKA“ here:

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The Zyklons – s/t ( Concrete Noise, 2019) ****

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos

I came across The Zyklons while doing my favorite surfing routine through discogs’ enormous database. Never heard them before, so to my pleasure I realized they were fellow Athenians, one of the few here that struggle with the pains of improvisation. In the mean time, a few weeks back, I caught them live witnessing their need to experiment and not present a solid image of the duo. Well done guys.

The three long tracks that comprise this cd are improvisations recorded, more or less, a year back. Alex M. is on many noises (toys, keys, electronics, voices) while Perseas Rizos plays the sax. My first feeling when listening was that it is a mixture of the Incus ethos as it was channeled by the second wave of British improvisers. There’s a strong sense of camaraderie throughout the recording. The guys are friends and this fact constitutes their way of playing. It is by communicating in situ and every time in a different manner.

You get the feeling of a continuity and fluidity all along the three tracks. Rizos, through his sax, is always on the watch to act upon, or react, on what Alex M. is doing at the moment. A strong feeling of freedom comes back to you when listening to the three tracks. The rhythms that Alex M. produces come from different views of the sonic spectrum: industrial, free jazz, noise always in a playful manner. Hidden beneath all those elements is an amateur’s view of fooling around or, even better, of a child’s game.

Do not get me wrong, the guys are very serious about it and put a lot of effort. But that sense of humor, of not taking yourself absolutely seriously, is always there, always ready to remind us that music making is an enactment of freedom. Take a chance on this freedom, as I did, and listen to The Zyklons.

@ koultouranafigo

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Axel Dörner, Agustí Fernández & Ramon Prats - Venusik (Multikulti, 2018) ****

By Stef

There is an amazing number of free jazz and free improvisation albums that associate with the physics of the universe, astronomy and space exploration (from Coltrane and Sun Ra ... to more recently Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Jemeel Moondoc). The link is obvious for a number of reasons: first because of the music's universality in the literal sense, of transcending borders, of going where no man has gone before, of exploration and adventure, second because of the inherent spiritual sentiment of belonging, of a kind of collective membership of something much bigger and vaster that connects us all and offers a depth and breadth that dwarfs our daily petty concerns, liberating us from the 'here and now' into something of true importance. This music aspires to be grand, majestic, timeless and of the absolute essence. This does not mean that it's per definition arrogant or pretentious. Space travel is also a very humbling experience.

On this album in the Sponteneous Music Tribune Series of the Polish Multikulti label, this trio is on its way to Venus, using the name of the Soviet Venera space programme that started in the 60s to explore the 'morning star'. In analogy with the Sputnik, the probe was called Venusik by Western media. The trio are Axel Dörner on trumpet and electronics, Agusti Fernández on piano and Ramon Prats on drums and percussion. The naming of the instruments is pretty useless because you will hardly recognise the sound of these individual instruments in the music itself.  The titles of the five tracks all refer to the acronyms of various national space agencies:

1. AEM - Agencia Espacial Mexicana (Mexican Space Agency)
2. SSO - Swiss Space Office
3. SRON - Stichting Ruimte-Onderzoek Nederland (Netherlands Institute for Space Research)
4. SUPARCO - Pakistan Space And Upper Atmosphere Research Commission 
5. SNSB - Swedish National Space Board

The music itself is as undefined as matter and anti-matter in outer space. "AEM" offers light scraping, grinding, squealing, rasping, screeching sounds that start to coalesce into multiple layers and increased density and even stronger intensity, which seamlessly evolves into "SSO" which shifts to more discernible sounds, with thundering arhythmic drumming, voiced trumpet and madly resonating piano strings. Dörner's sound is agonising over the magnificent mayhem of piano and percussion.

"SRON" brings us back to more hesitating explorations, with whispered industrial sounds and rumbling drums, as if an exercise of how sound vibrates in alien circumstances without oxygen, even to the extent that the second part of the piece is barely audible as if moving beyond the human level of auditive perception.

"SUPARCO" moves from a quiet universe into something that is devastating and overwhelming. Again, our language is too poor to capture the sonic complexity and novelty, but it's somehow shocking to listen to. As a listener you don't want to experience this - because you're way out of your comfort zone - but then you also relish it.

"SNSB" starts quieter, more granular and deeply resonating. Fernández creates a shimmering foundation over which Dörner's lengthy tones hover, with heavy drum beats emphasising the drama, then the strings become ominous and foreboding, with heavy rhythmic thumping inside the piano adding gravity and a sense of inevitability, as if you're on a spacetrain that's now totally out of control. The oscillating linear single trumpet sounds add an eery atmosphere of doom to the proceedings. Then things quiet down. The momentum decreases, the volume becomes lighter, the density decreases ... yet the tension remains.

The album's power is its unique sound, the cohesiveness of the musical vision the three musicians create and the coherence of it throughout the entire performance. And it's a great exploratory sonic journey through space. It's great that musicians, even the most avant-garde, still take things a step further to 'go where no man has gone before'.

Embark and enjoy!


Listen and download from Bandcamp.

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Two from Axel Dörner

By Nick Ostrum

Isabelle Duthoit, Axel Dörner, Matthias Müller, Roy Carroll – The Monophonic Havel (Mamu Music, 2018) ***½

This is an interesting release. I was familiar with Dörner and trombonist Matthias Müller (owner of Mamu Music) but had never encountered vocalist Isabelle Duthoit or electroacoustic artist Roy Carroll before. Already at first listen, it became apparent that I had been missing out on some very creative musicians.

From the first hisses, wisps, and buzzes of the initial track, Werder, I was hooked. (I am not sure what to make of this, but each track is named after a city, district, or natural site in or around the German state of Brandenburg, located, notably or not, in the former East Germany.) The Monophonic Havel is reminiscent of Dörner’s work on the Creative Sources label (Fabula and nie come to mind). The music is general quiet, but it is not quite as expansive and delicate as some of his earlier forays into electro-acoustic minimalism. That said, I was not surprised discovering with a quick internet search that both Duthoit and Müller have recorded with Creative Sources, as well.

It took me a few years and an upgraded sound-system, but I have warmed to this style of music over the years. It still does not always resonate with me, but it certainly does on this album. Duthoit, Dörner, Müller, and Carroll’s sounds frequently entangle and fuse into an almost seamless, solid knot, only to emerge as separate threads again moments later. Sometimes I hear discrete trumpet, trombone, vocals, and other various sounds. Others, I hear layered drones, or ripples and slaps. At others, it sounds like breath (possibly conveyed through brass), wind, and faint ruffling that resemble an open-air field recording, albeit with intention.

Despite very balanced performances, I was most struck by Duthoit. I do not listen to much abstract vocal music. There are exceptions, but, too frequently, I find it either distracting or, after a good half-hour or so, tiresome. Duthoit may help change my mind. She is creative but reserved. She seems to have mastered an impressive vernacular range. She can blend with a horn or Carroll’s bag of electronic tricks. When necessary, she can simply breathe her way to the front, or surreptitiously fade into perception with one of her delightfully odd, throaty incantations. The skills she deploys here would be lost in most other situations. They shine here.

Axel Dörner, Augustí Fernández, Ramon Prats – Venusik (Multikulti, 2018) ****

Featuring Dörner on trumpet and electronics, Augustí Fernández on piano, and Ramon Prats (whom I had previously not encountered) on percussion, this album is more active than the previous one. And, although it comes as no surprise that Dörner’s name graces the label, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Fernández playing in such a thoroughly abstract vernacular. He has explored some of this territory before, but it seems he was particularly focused on nonidiomatic techniques and percussive dynamics on this recording.

There is no single leader or stand-out on Venusik (presumably a portmanteau for Venusian music) and that all pieces are largely if not completely improvised. Still, if you come to this as I did, relatively familiar with some of the larger twists and turns of Dörner’s catalog, you will likely know what to expect. Tracks tend more towards spacey soundscapes than songs. (Two notable exceptions are SSO, wherein ebullient piano pounding and trumpet wailing overlay restive drumming and the wandering SUPARCO, which gives way several minutes in to some energetic free improv and, toward, the end, a series of extended piano trills and repeated note-clusters, electronic static, and percussive clatter.) Tracks also tend to experiment more with sound dynamics and textures than with rhythm, melody, and sonority. Spatiality plays an important role in most of these pieces, even if the musicians inevitably give in to their horror vaccui after more restrained and focused frictive passages. This album, in other words, has a lot going on and, even if we can affix certain labels or adjectives to its tendencies, it is quite unpredictable and, in that, intriguing. If you listen passively, it might be easy to dismiss this as just another release of extended techniques and strange, slightly unnerving musical ambiance punctuated by some intense, though arrhythmic and amelodic, blow-outs. If you listen actively, however, nuances emerges and it becomes clear that this is one more worthwhile contribution to all three artist’s catalogs and particularly that of Dörner, who has been exploring this musical territory at least for over a decade and a half. And, as the years and releases pass, he consistently and meticulously digs deeper and deeper into its potentialities.

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Axel Dörner, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Clayton Thomas & Tony Buck - Invisible Cinema (Self, 2018) ****

By Stef

German trumpet-player Axel Dörner is a man with strong skills and comparable courage and vision. He is not afraid to cross boundaries, pushing them further to sonic places where many are afraid to venture, let alone listen to. Not everything is successful, but that is the price you pay for adventure. You can't find new and distant planets with every space journey. On this album he performs with French altoist Jean-Luc Guionnet, who is possibly an equally daring explorer as Dörner. Australian Clayton Thomas plays double bass, and he and Guionnet were part of the "Ames Room", the now defunct trio with Will Guthrie on drums. Thomas also released an album with Dörner in 2009. The drummer on this album is Tony Buck, also from Australia, an equally strong explorer who performed and recorded several albums with Dörner already.

So when these four guys met for a live performance in November 2007 in Berlin, the stage was set. The venue was the Lichtblik Kino, a cinema theatre with a capacity of 32 people, and to assess the applause, I don't think the room was filled to capacity.

Nevertheless, the attending free improv afficionados got what they came for: two lengthy improvisations - here delivered in four parts - of unexpected sounds that mix and merge and create new live, somehow like the first molecules in the primordial sea did to create the first living organism.

Like with these organic molecules, sounds are reduced to minimal elements, individual notes produced with a certain quality or timbre, and they blend or contrast any other sound that is produced,  from the same instrument or from other instruments. Together, they progress, develop and cling to each other to form something new, something bigger than the sum of all these parts. The live created here is both esthetic and emotional: the carefully crafted sounds are hesitant and fragile in their interaction, shying away from each other or rejoicing in their mutual discovered intimacy. The pace is slow and unhurried, as if time is not an issue, or even to the contrary, the slower the process, the deeper the sonic connection. And what you hear may sound somehow vaguely familiar: the chattering of night creatures, the rumbling of an earthquake, the gurgling of water, the howling of the wind, the far tones of a fog horn, or strange industrial noise ... it's hard to put your finger on it, because it is all of this and nothing of this. It's only in the long last piece that rhythm becomes explicit - mesmerising and trance-like - and momentum increase with short wailing tones from the slide trumpet wriggling itself from the darkness of the other sounds.

But there is no question about it: whatever is created, it's very much alive.

Listen and download from Bandcamp.

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Areni Agbabian – Bloom (ECM, 2019) ****½

By Nick Ostrum

I came to Bloom practically blind. I had never listened to Areni Agbabian before. Apart from the characteristic ECM glossy production, I really was not sure what to expect.

Agbabian is a California-native now living in New York who, from a young age, has been steeped in Armenian musical and folkloric traditions. Given her diverse embrace of Caucasian folk music, contemporary jazz, and new music as well as her use of unsettling folktales (“The Water Bride”), I am still not exactly sure how to interpret her. It may be that this type of music is simply not in my wheelhouse. (And, if Agbabian is at all representative, that is an unfortunate oversight on my part.) That said, it might also be because of her own talents as a singer, pianist, and composer, and her refined eclecticism. Her vocals are at times experimental (“The River”) verging on operatic scatting, and at others, hymnic and haunting (“Mother”). Her piano is repetitive, minimalist, and delicate. Some pieces are melodically driven. Others explore resonance and spacious harmonies. Regardless, the compositions hold in common a spaciousness and fragile potency. Songs tend to be concise, all except the opening track (aptly titled “Patience: I. Patience Is More Important Now…/II. A Time To Be With You As A Time To Pray”) coming in at under five minutes and most under four. This allows for each song to be a concentrated statement, whether a succinct study of tone and timbre (for instance, listen to “Aganim Arachi Ko,” a composition by Agbabian, and its traditional counterpart “Aganim Revisited”), a brief meditation on minimalist intertwining percussion (“Light Effect” and “Colored”), or an investigation of eerily patient melodicism (“Full Bloom”). It also allows this album to progress at a concerted, steady pace and tell a story (be it sorrowful, wistful, or nostalgic) of fragmented memories slowly mulled over, reconstructed, and reinterpreted. The result is a collection of tracks that reside somewhere in that hauntingly beautiful space between loss and remembrance, between peace and unease, between quiet dormancy and vibrant bloom. Highly recommended.

https://www.ecmrecords.com/catalogue/1534926181/bloom-areni-agbabian

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Paal Nilssen-Love/Ken Vandermark - Screen Off (PNL Records) ****

By Martin Schray
 
On a factual level, Screen Off is Ken Vandermark’s and Paal Nilssen-Love’s tenth album. However, this being a well-documented project, they decided to do it in an exceptional way. With Nilssen-Love’s house producer Lasse Marhaug, they've rummaged through countless Vandermark/PNL Youtube clips from over the past ten years. Obviously, these recordings are unprofessional, and it’s like listening to random bits of their music, but Nilssen-Love’s and Vandermark’s idea “was to embrace the limitations of the format”. In order to accomplish this, they used 21 audio snippets (and left out the videos, which is why they called the album Screen Off). Marhaug didn’t use the selected excerpts chronologically, but rather in a way that allows the music to make a certain sense. However, this implied jumping back and forth between the cuts. He also used a strict time limit for his selection and since the duo usually plays long sets, the result often sounds disruptive because the music is sometimes cut off in the middle of a certain musical process.

Such an unconventional way of putting an album together has several interesting effects. Bootleg recordings, of course, are a double-edged sword. On the one hand they are promoting music, and on the other hand, they are published without the artists’ permissions, and typically the musicians are not satisfied with the quality of this music. Nilssen-Love and Vandermark however have reversed this process and use what has been released without authorization and thus regain a certain interpretive sovereignty over their material. Secondly, Screen Off works like a collage, presenting a series of seemingly unrelated sequences that suddenly shift. Doing this Nilssen-Love, Vandermark and Marhaug are able to highlight what the duo is about: bringing together different musical styles like funk, expressive free jazz, impressionist sound excursion, Latin grooves, balladesque moments etc. Juxtaposing them the way they do it here, these core elements are dragged into the spotlight and accentuated. Marhaug links these pieces like a radio DJ, using hard cuts, sound snippets, scratches and fade outs. This gives the album a certain rough punk rock/DIY approach. The poor sound quality is no disadvantage, rather it underlines the message.

In the end, the approach taken has an alienating effect (like in a Bertolt Brecht play, for example). On the one hand, it will disturb many listeners, on the other hand it’s something refreshingly new. For new listeners, I would recommend beginning with The Lions Have Eaten One Of The Guards. However for fans, it’s definitely a must.

Screen Off is available as a digital album and as a CD.

You can listen to it and buy it here: https://pnlrecords.bandcamp.com/album/screen-off

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Two more from PNL!

By Gustav Lindqvist 

Arashi – Jikan (PNL Records, 2019) ****½

That drummer Paal Nilssen-Love is a hard-working musician is an understatement. We’ve already seen two very nice releases from PNL Records on this side of 2019, both reviewed here, and now comes two more. First up is the super-trio Arashi with the freejazz legend reedsman Akira Sakata and the Fire! bassist Johan Berthling, returning with another album after their celebrated debut, follow-up Semikujira, and live album from the Trost Live Series. None of these players need much of an introduction on FJB. My expectations putting on this album for the first time was high. Hard hitting free jazz rocker Nilssen-Love, the dark bass from the inner fires of the earth Berthling together with the master himself Sakata. I mean, what can one expect other than something very special?

What we’ve got here is a live album recorded at the Pit Inn Club in Tokyo back in September of 2017. The first track doesn’t throw us over the edge to chaos and madness, but rather begins with Sakata’s voice over a dampened bass and small bells. But of course, it doesn’t last. This is just the start. I wait patiently as Berthling takes the first part of this track and starts to transform, reconstruct, and rebuild it. As we pass the eight-minute mark, tension increases as Nilssen-Love joins in. This almost ritual and meditative state of mind built up over this track is promising. The gift of patience is rewarding as percussion, bow and voice takes me to the start of the second track. Sakata’s alto cuts through the silence and the rocking motion of Berthling and Nilssen-Love is now building up to an unavoidable eruption. After sixteen minutes of this album, Arashi is finally ready to kick the doors wide open and away we go. Berthling brings that dark, dark carpet of rumbles and the temperature at the Pit Inn Club must’ve really reached the boiling point as the intensity keeps increasing.

On the albums third track, the trio demonstrates how tight they are. Their collaborative effort and responsiveness inside a vehicle running at full speed is very impressive. There are no blurry lines what so ever as the group charges onward and after an extended duo-solo part by Berthling and Nilssen-Love, Sakata joins back with voice to some how calm things down. Arashi finishes a beautiful album with percussive explorations and Sakata on clarinet. The final track is an emotional excursion, that allows me to reflect upon what I’ve just heard; which is indeed something special.

Paal Nilssen-Love & Ken Vandermark – Screen Off (2019, PNL Records) ****

Nilssen-Love and Vandermark has worked together in many different groups for many years. This duo album is a historical journey through ten years of their duo collaborations, edited and mastered by Lasse Marhaug. We get to hear 21 two-minute parts from live YouTube-clips from between 2008-2018. No video, just audio from different live-cuts. They’re not edited to be in order of performance year over year, but rather in a 42-minute-long expedition into the wild and free, which has edited cuts that transports us from part to part. It doesn’t come across as a sampler of this spectacular duo, but rather as an extended performance that forces the listener to pay attention to how the different parts are held together. Marhaug has done this in a masterly way! I don’t listen to this as an evolutionary transport from one place to another, or to showcase the duos work together over time, even though it is a historical journey, but rather as a stand-alone document of a free jazz duo that deserves to be heard and respected, packaged in a very cool way.

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