Todd McComb: Jazz archive, 08/2023-08/2024

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I've been writing new introductions here, more or less on an annual basis, in large part because this page remains in written order — so do scroll to the end for the latest thoughts. But I also find it worthwhile to write new introductions, as part of revisiting with myself around what I'm doing here. The other challenge is not to make this opening entry too long — while still being appropriate for both first time & returning readers. Of course, there're the prior intros as well, which can still be read, starting from the previous year's entries (including reviews)....

And most of those entries, maybe all, were oriented toward reviewing individual recordings, so that's largely become my writing prompt here, although I started with more open-ended notions.... And I've wanted to support younger performers as well, from the start here, although I soon found that many senior performers continue to have much to offer. So I've come to feel that I must first select for music here, for context if nothing else, hopefully without becoming too immersed in my own familiarities over time.... I thus listen to many less established artists, but I suppose often in a more prospective sense. In that, though, I also retain a broad preference for smaller ensembles (& especially their "social" dynamics), e.g. trios & quartets, i.e. beyond solos. (Yet I'm usually left soloing here....)

Hopefully I also retain an emphasis on learning too, and so on experimenting with music (& in turn elsewhere): I'll note striking albums here, maybe without seeming like finished products, but I also maintain a "convenient" list of favorite albums, i.e. for repeated listening & reference. In that sense, concepts of "use" arise here, and I try especially to interrogate what I'm getting out of music — which is already presented as a "product" by the time it reaches me. Much of that revolves around affectivity, but not necessarily arousal (or expression per se), rather notions of environment or ambience (& silence), therefore of modulating the everyday. (I'm not necessarily interested in "argument....") So I find much of this music — as well as the thrust of "experiment" in general — to be helpful in everyday life. It can be cleansing, and it can be a spur to (further) thought, but the impact is (hopefully) beyond mere thought....

Much of the "cleansing" then revolves around a decolonizing project — moving in accompanying theoretical discussions from e.g. Postmodern Aesthetics (2019) to a Decolonizing Tech series (2020-) — such that "jazz" figures a particular response to globalism & indeed decolonization. (And as opposed to "post-" formulations, jazz doesn't note simply the passing of history: It's been an active "de-." So one might say that jazz is about consciously moving from one world to another....) Some of this has come as well to interrogate what is "natural": I've been especially interested in music outside of 12-tone equal temperament, for instance, and developments in that arena seem (finally) to have real momentum. (Some of this is called "spectral music," but there're more indigenous-derived formations, plus ongoing explorations of "acoustics" per se....) Thus I've also continued to take an interest in that most (paradoxically) "natural" of instruments, the human voice. But anything from around the world seems to be coming into this (musical) space, part of a sort of generalized fusion....

I've been interested in musical "production" as well, e.g. various combinations with electronics, which permeate recorded (& increasingly live...) performance anyway. (I've been broaching e.g. AI for a while here now.) And as noted, everything is already (multiply) mediated by the time it reaches me in this space, so I do try to focus on the result, however it might be made. Again, is it useful? And then "how it's made" can be an exciting topic as well.... (All of this points further to broad notions of music already as (a) technology....) And where or how is it useful? Most of what's discussed here is improvised, so the idea that it might be less appealing for repeated listening doesn't imply a flaw per se... it's just something less easy to register through all this mediation. (Subsequently illuminating immediacy is certainly easier said than done....) At some level, I also want to feel some kind of "wow" though, even if it passes. And there's just so much more music in this space than when I started, including more along lines that would've surely drawn my attention in prior decades.... (I also see elements of my own style appearing elsewhere....) So there's far more that I could be discussing within & around this general space, not only individual albums.

It can thus become something of a challenge to decide what to review here, as it'd be "easy" to write far more entries, if only to note other "similar" releases by musicians I've already appreciated. Ties of similarity & relation branch in all directions after all, but I'm still trying to write something here only when really prompted. (This does sometimes lead to gaps, e.g. where I forget something because I didn't write about it here — so I'm not entirely satisfied with my "system" either. There's also simply a matter of not duplicating what someone else has to say, although again, that can end up meaning subsequent lacunae....) And I want to remain open to new ideas, not always filling my head with what I'd heard before.... In any case, while I'm generally "recommending" any album that I actually discuss here, I don't want to imply that there aren't other albums of similar style & quality as well. Sometimes my choices simply have to be contingent, especially in order to avoid routine. (Although many people like to see their work mentioned, I don't believe that a routine discussion is actually very helpful. Maybe it would be better instead to have "news....")

That said, we're still in a summer lull, and I don't actually have anything lined up to review at the moment, such that I'm writing this intro into relative vacuum. So let's see what happens next....

And as it happened, the very day that I finished the new intro above, String Noise Sounds was released by the Infrequent Seams label. The latter has been building an eclectic catalog, including appearing on streaming sites beyond Bandcamp, featuring various composed music albums too, along with improvisation. And indeed the violin duo "String Noise" — Pauline Kim Harris & Conrad Harris — had already appeared on the label playing composed music, as seems to be their norm: They have a variety of albums exploring contemporary compositions in the latest styles (i.e. post-Cage), as well as e.g. popular music arrangements, but String Noise Sounds (apparently recorded on two dates in 2022), is an improvised album (& so more typical of the space here). It also takes String Noise first to a quartet, which the very short (& somewhat confusing) notes state to be the original formation, here with Jessie Cox (drums) & Sam Yulsman (synths, piano) — then also with "guests" Bethany Younge (voice) & Jesse Stiles (electronic drone). The latter two are described emphatically as composers, and may appear only on the "B" side of this very long (nearly an hour & a half, so basically a double album) cassette. There's certainly voice low in the texture at times there, simmering breath, or muted screams... and I'm not sure how to distinguish someone playing "drone" amid someone playing synth. (None of the additional musicians was familiar to me previously.) In any event, the "A" opening is immediately striking, with shimmering metal & soon frenetic twittering suggestive of some kind of industrial jungle (with muttering voices only early), coming to open out around what present almost as harp arpeggios.... The opening track is also the longest, and doesn't feature piano, rather various electronics (perhaps in glissandi...) & spatialization. It can even come off as a sort of variant on Braxton's Diamond Curtain Wall Music. (Later tracks have passages that are more dominated by piano though, including playing classic styles at times, such that there can be a sense of "genre" evoked later in the program, even as it's passing....) String Noise Sounds is thus a world-making sort of album, sometimes evocative of other contemporary improvising string formations (e.g. Ernesto Rodrigues & e.g. String Theory), but generally challenging direct comparisons: The focus on developing through continuity does suggest various contemporary pan-stylistic bands though, particularly as the core violin duo can be rendered almost unrecognizable through the ensemble interactions, despite nearly constant (e.g. "whistling" & creaking) activity. That said, the more open textures here are probably the more striking overall, in what can seem like a relatively preliminary (& generally energetic) (re?)-exploration. Both dates-sides then end abruptly, each having settled into similarly aggressive & dense collective textures.

Then speaking of composition, the past year also seems to have been big for releases of music by Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016): Per the previous entry, Altamirage — consisting of improvised duos between the composer & bassist James Ilgenfritz, plus performances of two of Oliveros' compositions from the 1960s — actually appeared late last year, as noted in the previous review of a "K7 Commission" release from Infrequent Seams, Ekphrastic Discourse (in January). Sound Pieces then appeared on Another Timbre from cellist Anton Lukoszevieze & Apartment House, consisting entirely of compositions (from 1975-1998): I've found Sound Pieces appealing, and have continued to listen since it appeared, but didn't write a review at the time. In large part, this reflects uncertainty on my part, both in terms of the general context of Oliveros' compositional output (as I have no real survey, etc.) & the technical specifics of the works themselves: Many are "text pieces" with little or no musical notation, but instructions or choices for the performer. Discussions are then sometimes framed around Oliveros' Deep Listening practice, which seems straightforward in an overall way, but about which I know few specifics. So I've been unsure where to start (but part of that is going to need to be developing my own language connections...). And I've been affected by the Apartment House readings (which consist of performances from late 2022 into 2023...), but they also tend to be very careful, relatively smooth (in the way this group plays a lot of post-Cage music...), maybe even tentative at times. In contrast, improvisations with Oliveros herself can be quite intense, including on Altamirage — where the (early) compositions are rather spiky as well, showing an almost Webernian concentration of gesture. (Oliveros ultimately combines this sort of concentration with close attention to human intimacy per se, yielding a powerful affective stance.) So there's a sense of wondering just "how much" Oliveros' text pieces really contribute to a musical outcome, with such a question actually fitting rather well into my prior comments on judging the usefulness of musical outcomes (i.e. as products), and I've indeed found this orientation to be especially clear through the lens of the most recent release here: Two or Three (pace Altamirage) is also an older recording (apparently from March 2018), released just last weekend (on Chicago's Amalgam Music), combining Oliveros' compositions with improvisation. In this case, the title composition — a commission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, completed shortly before her death in 2016 — is performed in three versions, interspersed with longer improvisations. (The performers are Chicago sax frontman Mars Williams (b.1955), noted here way back in May 2012 with Extraordinary Popular Delusions, but perhaps best known for his An Ayler Xmas albums since 2016, and a musician currently recovering as I understand from a serious illness — plus CSO musicians Katinka Kleijn & Rob Kassinger on cello & bass.) And as usual here, I have no idea what is really specified in the composition, although it's described as offering the performer choices, but the fact is that the composed pieces come off more compellingly than the improvisations. (Of the latter, the first seems to be a memorial, almost a dirge at times, while the second is more open-ended & exploratory, but only really comes together around a typical free jazz, horn-centric dynamic....) Again there's this sense of Webernian pointillism, particularly at first, but weaving in more spectral shading as well, yielding a naturalistic (quasi-primitivist) counterpoint, a kind of haunting suspension or latency. (One thus gets a double sense of "spectral" here as well.) So how does Oliveros do it? What is the practical means by which her participation via texts makes for more compelling music? Again, I'm working with a very limited sense of what these pieces specify (i.e. tentatively myself...), but I've noted here in the past a sense of when free improvisation becomes more "coherent" (to pick one partly-useful word I've used...), and generally an issue with ongoing satisfaction isn't so much with the techniques or even the quality of the ideas per se, but rather in coming together into some kind of whole. And often there seem to be tacit agreements about where to go or what to play, sometimes a few comments exchanged between musicians to start, or maybe just a shared image or orientation that isn't even articulated. However, particularly as possibilities multiply, some kind of "framework" becomes more meaningful — or less universally implied (or tacit), I might say. Enter Oliveros, who seems to have anticipated this sort of scenario, the notion that maybe "improvisation" could use a further (variable) conceptual orientation or specificity.... (Note how e.g. Cage distrusted improvisation, albeit based on his practical experiences of what performers did under those circumstances. He thus didn't think "past" improvisation, i.e. to where we are today, basically not so much genre-bound anymore, but with "too much" in the way of possibilities for any particular moment.) So then given the "choice" framework for Two or Three, are we to guess e.g. that the orchestral musicians made the piece more contrapuntal than it might have been from others? I don't know, but I do know that these Oliveros albums seem to bring together something beyond the performers themselves. And I also know that a smooth, placid presentation wasn't how Oliveros appeared herself. (Even pictures of her meditating seem "socially" intense somehow.) However, there is also ultimately a sense of affective healing here, once again....

Hunt at the Brook (recorded in 2014) has felt like a pivotal album for me, in terms of finding my own interests in this space, i.e. as slowly moving away from following a variety of other sources (as can seem inevitable...), into more personal priorities & articulations. Moreover, that's been underscored by ongoing interest in the performers involved: Just this past May, I reviewed It used to be an elephant (recorded in 2022 & released on Daniel Thompson's Empty Birdcage label), a quintet combining the original trio with frequent collaborators Dirk Serries & Colin Webster. (That album comes off as more exploratory, preliminary again with its unusual ensemble....) And there I'd traced some historical relations as well, including to me in this space, so I'll skip over some of that now. Nonetheless, the recent release of two albums at once on Serries' "A New Wave of Jazz" label — Hunt at the Brook Again & with Neil Metcalfe — necessitates some further thoughts on chronology (as well as confirms that Hunt at the Brook was a significant project for the trio of musicians involved): The addition of Metcalfe on flute for the second album of this double release raises as well his participation (with Thompson) in Runcible Quintet, e.g. their own quartet formation on (half of) Four suggesting something of the quartet interaction here. Of course, the Runcible albums have more in the way of rhythmic articulation via drums, but there's a sort of tuneful "anthropology music" cultivated as well. (This is a notion I've been articulating here over the past few years, namely musical inspiration from "natural" sounds, e.g. zoomimesis, or in this case more in the way of outdoor resonances woven into a sort of harmonic tapestry....) And there's likewise a sort of pointillism much of the time underlying Hunt at the Brook, multiple relations woven more densely than a real (ecological) scene, evoking multiple perspectives & collisions in counterpoint.... So the chronology here implicates Runcible as well, the latter's most recent album Three having been recorded in March 2019 (& reviewed here in May 2020), followed by Hunt at the Brook Again in April 2019 & Hunt at the Brook with Neil Metcalfe in May 2019. And I'd already been emphasizing post-pandemic productions here, so this does come to seem like the past.... Still, both albums have been quite compelling, and further (even centrally...) illuminate subsequent productions: 2019 had opened for Thompson & Benedict Taylor recording the double duo album T'other in January (launching Thompson's new label...), as reviewed here in November 2020, i.e. only after I'd reviewed the horn-less SETT (recorded in November 2019, and first documenting the unusual double acoustic guitar formations that followed these trio & quartet chamber ensembles...). (Taylor himself also went on to record a series of duos that year, including Live Offerings 2019 with Serries, reviewed here in March 2021, plus e.g. Knotted Threads with Yves Charuest on Inexhaustible Editions.... Moving ahead then, he appears with Serries & e.g. with Stefan Keune for the middle disc of Live at Plus-Etage, Volume 1 too, recorded last September: That understated triple album, also produced by Serries, includes two striking duo recitals as well, from different musicians who also intersect this unit sometimes.) Meanwhile, I've had more of an "in order" (if sparser...) chronology for clarinetist Tom Jackson (who joined the core Hunt at the Brook trio later, replacing Alex Ward from Compost, as reviewed here in April 2013...), appearing e.g. with the trio album Nauportus with Thompson (reviewed already July 2019, but after the present recordings were made), and then Dandelion (actually recorded in the interim in 2021) with Serries instead on guitar. (The latter was also presented in big, dynamic 24bit sound — as are now Hunt at the Brook Again & Hunt at the Brook with Neil Metcalfe....) And then Thompson himself has recently e.g. reprised his duo with Webster, releasing However, Forward! (as recorded only last October) this month on Webster's Raw Tonk label, yielding a relatively tighter articulation for that ongoing formation.... So then one thing I've (apparently) learned from doing this sort of review over the years is that it becomes too easy simply to trace relations.... What about the specific music? Why do I return (even to 2019 yet again)? For one, there's always more to appreciate, even to learn! For instance, sometimes I feel smart for appreciating the original Hunt at the Brook, but the notes for this new release also tell me that I didn't pick up on title, which names the engineer & (studio) location. (So then I don't feel so smart.) Anyway, I'd instead focused on the outdoorsy quality (pace the previous), and even a sense of nostalgia, i.e. as "also" reflected in the track titles. (And admittedly, the fact that this was a substantial album, lengthy rather than short, figured into my interest in those days, i.e. offering more to chew on over time....) Now the "new" albums — & they're still significantly more recent than the original trio, even if one wonders why the delayed release... — dispense with track titles (as so often in this space...), figuring similar material inspirations into a denser & more detailed network, seeming to leave behind nostalgia per se (about which I've already expressed ambivalence...). (There's of course still the matter of my own familiarity....) So while Hunt at the Brook Again provides a remarkably taut & lively exploration of some of the earlier ideas in greater depth & concentration (as befitting a reprise five years later...), Hunt at the Brook with Neil Metcalfe then broaches some different interactions, more in the way of harmonic shading (e.g. via register between the two woodwinds), yielding almost a modernist vibe in more chordal sections (& incorporating e.g. traffic, beyond anything potentially idyllic...). A similar, more chordal (v. pointillist) approach then opens It used to be an elephant (without Metcalfe), before turning elsewhere.... Acoustic guitar particularly feels like a pivot for the quartet formation, articulating counterpoints rhythmically, the potentially chordal viola often functioning more like a horn, raucous even at times, almost an alto sax.... Hunt at the Brook with Neil Metcalfe can thus feel almost like three top lines — & regular readers will know that pairing flute with clarinet was likely to appeal to me... — yielding a "different" approach to (fluid) harmonic combinations, pace e.g. "spectral" ideas on ("natural") overtone relations. There's also some real "fire" on both albums, especially from violist Taylor, but the "modernist" feel also involves tangible affective modulation, a sort of sinking-calming at times (including dueling runs...), moody... maybe sometimes almost new age-y? But with its assertive opening & quicker pace of articulation & dynamics, Hunt at the Brook Again had already made Hunt at the Brook seem relatively more stark (or classic...), similar materials & inspiration worked further into more intricate articulations.... Both formations are still able to summon a sense of quiet (or even silence) as well, via basic fluidity figuring dynamics throughout. As far as musical parameters per se then, i.e. in addition to their articulation of an abstracted ecology, it's perhaps this sense for "dynamics" that most marks this group of colleagues as (sometimes) a collective. Theirs is thus a rich (rather than simplistic...) interaction with the world (& especially its outdoor sonic palette...), yielding a regime of actively shifting attention, figuration & human choice as well. Counterpoint per se then comes to feel like a condensation or embodiment of multiply intersecting experiences.

Moving to a shorter & more recently recorded album, next I want to note Flight Rvw2349 by Georg Wissel (alto sax), Guilherme Rodrigues (cello) & Michael Vorfeld (percussion) — recorded live by Sacred Realism's Bryan Eubanks in Berlin this past April. The result is relatively short, basically including a restart midway, but capturing an intense sense of ritual sonic communion, especially through its opening gesture. (The reference is again to a "spectral" sense of harmony, of blending instrumental timbres via overtones, i.e. "acoustics" in the sense of e.g. John Butcher & Induction, there with more sense of intentionality or distance, here seeming more intimate per se....) Of course, I've noted Rodrigues here often, especially with his father Ernesto (e.g. with recent favorites Dérive & L'âge de l'oreille), but also in finding his own style, intuitive & sometimes warmly lyrical, but also with its own kind of starkness, linear & distended, e.g. articulated in trio (without Ernesto) on Kita, Rodrigues & Yamagishi (as reviewed here in July 2020). But while that album can come off as something of a (linear) travelogue, Flight Rvw2349 cultivates instead an intense sense of vertical resonance & place. (And a similar sweep & energy dynamic could describe another notable Rodrigues trio album to appear recently outside of Creative Sources, Zwosch, Zwosch & Zwosch from A New Wave of Jazz — pace the previous entry... — there with Carlos Zingaro & José Oliveira, also yielding a single 32' track, but recorded already in July 2021....) And I'd recently mentioned both Wissel & Vorfeld here as well: Wissel released a "similar" album in Thirty Nine Fifty Five (as mentioned in a March 2023 review of Etienne Nillesen & T.ON...), the second with his C/W|N trio, "generally sparse but deeply fusing the instrumental resonances & timbres," i.e. involving a similar approach, but there more ethereal around sparse piano (versus rich cello tone). Wissel's horn thus ranges here from a sort of background resonance or accent to brief, piercing intensity — i.e. as the "edge" of a twisting, composite trio timbre. (There's some quietly intense vocalizing as one climax too, but I'm unsure of the source.) And then Vorfeld was e.g. involved in longtime favorite Nashaz (from which I eventually started talking about a "nautical" style of overtone relations...), plus more recently (again) with Sawt Out, that trio's Black Current & Machine Learning having been reviewed here together just this past July — all involving explorations of overtone alignments, often with high intensity. So this trio & its unassuming self-release (only on Rodrigues' Bandcamp site...) came as a surprise, but there was still plenty of reason to anticipate an intriguing result. And as far as the sense of ritual? I guess that's how acoustic resonance & timbral blending can present themselves, fusion of relations per se as always already a sort of ritual. (And I should note as well on this point Rodrigues' own solo album from last year, Acoustic Reverb, set in a variety of churches....) In that sense, one perceives the evocation of an evolving genre or scene here, while also being especially direct, i.e. with strong intimacy (as already suggested), but without much sense of superfluous ideas or busy-ness. (Such a sense of "genre" can come to mark tonality per se as itself a broad abstraction....) What one finds then, or so I think I hear, is the trio overcome by its own ritual intensity, coming to skulk about midway (so moving to some reflexive techniques...), trying to process (intellectually, emotionally) for themselves what just occurred.... (That would be as opposed to the sort of "distance" or planning suggested elsewhere above... but also not atypical of an improvised meeting....) So maybe they'll reconvene at some point. In the meantime, Flight Rvw2349 (the title of which eludes me too...) already has some electric moments.

Sestetto Internazionale is another ongoing collective developing its own sound, now with a third album, Due Mutabili from Munich live in March 2022. I'd reviewed the sextet's second album Live in Munich 2019 in March 2020, there including some fascinating six-way material at times, but also some tracks for reduced forces, a bit of odds & ends, maybe even seeming somewhat genre-bound in moments.... Their lineup of three soprano instruments against three "harmonic backdrop" instruments remained intriguing though, and Due Mutabili provides two substantial tracks documenting ongoing developments, also with more in the way of overall continuity (although, of course, still with passages of reduced forces, etc.). Moreover, there aren't many sextets that manage to stay together very long to develop a collective sound. In this case, there was actually a change from the previous album, with Philipp Wachsmann (violin, live electronics) replacing Alison Blunt, but the core of the group remains the soprano saxophone duo of Harri Sjöström & Gianni Mimmo, joined by violin on the front line, and then a timbrally rich "continuo section" of Achim Kaufmann (piano), Veli Kujala (quarter-tone accordion) & Ignaz Schick (turntables, sampler). Although the sextet does turn to what I might call "intentional weirdness" at times (e.g. the cartoonish, haunted or carnivalesque...), there's a growing sense of continuity as well maintained through the tracks: Sestetto Internazionale seems to be adopting something of the "ontology of motion" from the Move quintet (& e.g. their second album Move in Moers, as reviewed here in April 2021...), a group also founded by Sjöström (with vibraphonist Emilio Gordoa) & similarly involving Kaufmann: "Move" seems to retain more of a jazz reference though, i.e. with bass & drums, but the main difference from the evolution of Sestetto Internazionale is in the latter's double (& then triple, with violin...) top line, also distinguishing it from e.g. Evan Parker ensembles (i.e. around a single soprano, & to which I'd already compared Move...). There's also an electroacoustic component here then, and indeed Parker himself introduces the subsequent (acoustic) soprano duet album between Sjöström & Mimmo, the surprisingly full-bodied Wells (recorded in April 2022). So that original duo can still seem like something of a reduction of the larger group, or at least as evoking it, i.e. not unlike Parker's recent release with Sergio Armaroli, Dialog (on Ezz-thetics), on which he responds (later, in solo) to Armaroli's vibraphone solos: That album illustrates harmonic context & line as sorts of inversions of each other — & a similar nexus informs Sestetto Internazionale as well. But I wasn't turning to Armaroli arbitrarily: Kujala appeared with Sjöström on Armaroli's Windows & Mirrors (as reviewed here in December 2022), and also with Schick on Frank Gratkowski's Kuden (recorded in 2021) — which I'd mentioned in a brief "accordion survey" around a review of the trio album Stranger Becoming with Jonas Kocher (also in December 2022). I've been noting accordion regularly of late it seems, here with quarter tones extending pitch flexibility-fixity for the sextet, but also e.g. pairing with "reedy" horns or suggesting an electronic (e.g. synth) quality themselves. I also seem to encounter Schick in many places lately, e.g. with John Butcher on his "celebration" quartet album Lamenti dall'infinito (reviewed here in a series in February 2022), although his contributions can be less obvious at times (pace e.g. the static "ticks" opening the second track here, but then also "cartoon" eruptions...). And most of these instruments do have pitch flexibility, with Kaufmann's piano being the main exception, yet Kaufmann always seems to be able to contribute meaningfully to these sorts of tapestries.... (I'm not sure how he's able to transcend his own pitch limitations so regularly.) In any case, there does seem to be some real commitment to this sextet formation at this point — & Sjöström has self-released Due Mutabili, with e.g. Wells (released already in July) having made it onto streaming sites... — even as it can still seem rather exploratory. (It would probably also benefit from the clarity of 24bit recording.) The pregnant, rhetorical opening — plus the subtle entrances of the various instruments — will surely make an impression, though. There're also some feelings of routine developing over the long album, for better or worse, sometimes broken up by self-conscious novelty. However, the basic structural setup, combined with ongoing explorations of continuities (i.e. with further parallels to Anthony Braxton & ZIM), suggests much more potential — as well as seems to line up with broader explorations & trends....

So bringing Wachsmann into Sestetto Internazionale seems as though it could have led directly to his participation, with Sjöström, in an "alternative" Xpact quartet album — as also just released, on Wachsmann's Bead Records — Especially For You (recorded seven months later in October 2022, also in Munich). Apparently the concert was supposed to be part of a tour by Xpact — which I haven't actually reviewed (although it's an even longer running formation, sometimes now called Xpact II...) — but Stefan Keune & Hans Schneider couldn't attend, and so were replaced by Sjöström & Wachsmann, i.e. joining Erhard Hirt (guitar & computer treatment) & Paul Lytton (drums, cymbals, objects) from the original quartet. And without bass or the fire-breathing Keune (pace Hunt at the Brook Again thoughts here from earlier this week...), the quartet does come off completely differently: There's a generally ethereal, even thin thread maintained by electronics, often with subtle shifting & meandering otherwise. (The specter of Parker & his ElectroAcoustic Ensemble appears as well, especially with Lytton's participation, although the latter isn't apparently using electronics here himself.... And then, I'm unfamiliar with Hirt outside of Xpact.) The sound of accordion is also evoked from early in the proceedings, so presumably working with Kujala has made an impression on Wachsmann, who continues to be prolific himself.... So there're varieties of novel textures, some relatively understated, but also e.g. feelings of being asea, even evoking a sort of chaotic or imaginary realm, perhaps a kind of surreality — i.e. not really referencing physical space, but more a psychic space. There's again an issue with establishing-losing the feeling of novelty though, and the long (& often relatively unassertive) Especially For You ends up requiring sustained attention from the listener as well (i.e to its delicate continuities, rather than being actively gripping itself). In any case, pace the preceding, these are all flexible pitch instruments, and their interactions tend to feature airy (i.e. almost floating — as opposed e.g. to the basic gravity at times from the Sestetto...) & "twisting" textures. Thus it seems there would also be more to discover here, if the quartet does decide to develop its sound further. And of course Bead continues to be a label to watch (with, it seems, also some of their releases coming to streaming services...).

Now the DDK Trio has released their third album (on the eclectic & often stimulating Meenna label out of Japan), A Right to Silence having been recorded over a 5-day residency in France during June 2021, and presented as three differing sequences: One might call these three different albums, as the three members of the trio each arranged material gathered over the course of the residency into a single album. And so I want to discuss this interrogation of the production process, but also to highlight the musical material involved, which itself involves precise sorts of austere post-Cage figurations. The musical articulations & surrounding rhetorical-affective implications thus seem more sophisticated for A Right to Silence than DDK's previous albums, Floating piece of space (recorded in 2014) & Cone of Confusion (2017). The music would also seem to go beyond the presentation of a "triple" album per se, particularly as the production itself extends the trio's stated non-influence-in-the-choice-of-the-other attitude — an attitude seemingly reflected from Cage, yielding for him a sort of "affect at a distance," a notion more applicable to appraising the three versions of this album as a whole than it is to the musical interactions per se. There's thus a tangible sense of entering the production process for the listener: I've often wondered how e.g. the material appearing on a studio album was chosen, or ordered, because that's usually unstated. How much unused material is there, for instance? That's likewise unstated here.... What we're presented with, however, is a set of 14 different pieces, most appearing on all three programs (which consist of 10, 8 & 8 tracks respectively...), but not all, the pieces presented identically whenever they do appear, except for the possibility of inserting silences framing each, and in different orders. (There's an included discussion of this procedure, which is itself somewhat confusing, so I'm trying to run through it in some detail, because it's a new approach. One thing that does remain unspecified is how & when the individual pieces were named. I'm guessing it was collectively & after the programs were chosen.) The three versions are also personal choices, not chance orderings, so from a Cageian perspective, these would be performance choices. (One often lacks synchronicity with a musical performance, e.g. when discussing in this space, and such an interval is highlighted here.) And the result is three differing aesthetic narratives, although with considerable overlap, basically generating three perspectives on the material, yet yielding some kind of gestalt. These are thus relatively short quasi-ambient tapestries, which I'm usually disappointed to have end, even if they don't necessarily dominate my attention, while the differing versions do delay feelings of developing familiarity.... And as implied, the basic sound world of A Right to Silence recalls Cage as well, i.e. not so much indoor or outdoor sonic references (per various recent remarks here...), but sorts of "human" (i.e. musical-rhetorical) abstractions. (The articulation of piano chords, as well as the thin "extended" lines from others, specifically recall some of Cage's late sonic concerns....) The results can also feel like aural vignettes, intense or suspenseful in some moments (gestural, not unlike film music at times...), a sort of "nuts & bolts" approach that emphasizes precision & austerity over larger flow (e.g. contrasting with tapestries such as Due Mutabili, from the previous review...). It's also possible that illuminating the different individual perspectives removes the sense of "naturalness" (or magic) from the proceedings — such that the named (& "instant composed") pieces from DDK can come to seem pre-composed. (I'm not able to draw any clear conclusion on this point, however.) Their basic sound then overlaps with & differs from the field: DDK can sound quite pianistic around founder Jacques Demierre (b.1954), such that even when he's e.g. scuffling with strings, the results seem framed & piano-gestural.... And then accordion is becoming something of a theme itself, here again from Jonas Kocher (pace the previous review discussion & Stranger Becoming, a more ethereal, yet twisting or even flowery trio album...), who offers various held tones & pitch extremes in addition to some harmonic figurations, sometimes sounding like strings.... (And Demierre had appeared here previously only with Hans Koch — also from Stranger Becoming — i.e. with the duo album Incunabulum, reviewed July 2019.) The second "D" is then Axel Dörner, who's appeared in this space for a while (e.g. with Ernesto Rodrigues & the quartet Nor, first tentatively reviewed here in April 2015...), and most often performs windy breath or precise blasts of static here, again generally either in isolated figures or briefly repetitive backdrops. There's thus little in the way of traditional horn "expression," but the trumpet register also makes for differing interactions from those of what seems like the most obvious ensemble comparison, HMZ: The latter trio employs tuba instead, and viol rather than accordion (but then adds harmonica for e.g. Ize, after already functioning similarly via held tones...), but the piano comes off differently as well, generally less pianistic (e.g. more gamelan...) than DDK, yielding again even to synth (& so more of the "accordion sound"). Ize is then the fourth album from HMZ (recorded back in 2018, although released during lockdown), their first having been recorded in 2012, so over a slightly earlier time interval than DDK.... It does also yield a sense of flow (as less abstracted & "framed" than DDK's here). Indeed HMZ seems to involve a somewhat newer timbral grammar, more impersonal: A comparison can be made as well to perhaps Demierre's most prolific ensemble, the LDP trio & their most recent (double) album Last Concert in Europe (released last year by Jazzwerkstatt), there showing a similar (to DDK) urge toward abstraction (& various scuffling), as well as extended exploration of dynamics, but also being more explicitly moody & even retaining some feeling of jazz. There's likewise a lingering question there of "What about individual, human expression?" i.e. that a group such as HMZ seems be leaving behind.... (So this is in some sense a question of musical generations, in the case of DDK involving those born in the 1950s, 60s & 70s.) Then when it comes again back to nuts & bolts, and the basic sound of A Right to Silence, there're other comparisons, specifically both younger & older: Great Waitress (& e.g. their landmark second album Flock, from 2013) involves reed instead of brass in an otherwise similarly constituted trio, there eerily fusing timbres into ritualistic sculptures. And then Nessuno involved both brass & reed in a quartet, again a little more old-fashioned in its sense of ensemble dynamics, but generating various textural suspensions as well, eventually with great (virtuosic...) intensity. A Right to Silence thus comes to feel as though it establishes its own (sometimes starkly, always precisely...) gestural sonic dynamic, embracing a sense of human distance between the musicians, multiple (production) versions aside.

And Zyft — Henk Zwerver (acoustic guitar), Ziv Taubenfeld (bass clarinet) & Maya Felixbrodt (viola) — returns as well with Triangle Moments, just recorded in Amsterdam in June. The result is a more assertive & intricate trio interaction than for their first album, Midnight Tea Suite (favored here in April 2019, part of a rambling survey of Zwerver on Creative Sources...). Given the instrumentation then, there's a clear parallel to Hunt at the Brook Again & its review here earlier this month. One might even suggest some evocations of nostalgia in each case, more for the first album from the latter trio, and then Zyft's first outing still evoked more of a hint of rock/genre. So the "Zyft" name also suggests something unimportant, and it'd be difficult to assert that the trio really reaches for expression beyond itself (or beyond the everyday), but the forging of an egalitarian three-way interaction remains worthwhile in itself (as is the everyday...). Indeed Triangle Moments builds to a more unusual texture by the end, incorporating more extended technique, so there's still a sense of exploration.... (Although Zwerver has been relatively quiet since that prior batch of recordings, Taubenfeld has continued to raise his profile, e.g. with a Clean Feed leader album, while Felixbrodt is still someone I've heard only with this unit.... And viola does again bring some of the most intense & distinctive interjections here.) So there's some intensity at times, including to start, but generally more of a three-way conversation, perhaps one musician briefly taking the lead, soon back to a very collective feel & to composite (& contrapuntal, often pointillist around guitar) activity: The conversational style can quickly put the listening mind abuzz, but also opens up with time for more space to think. The compact Triangle Moments thus seems to invite a sort of local, yet far-ranging, "political" debate.

From Another Timbre is then Parallaxis forma, a new album devoted to composer Catherine Lamb (b.1982), as recorded from June through August this year by Nicholas Moroz & Explore Ensemble (with vocalists Exaudi Music Ensemble & Lotte Betts-Dean). And I'm once again offering a review shortly after release, as is my habit & project here, even as that might seem especially tenuous for newly composed music, but I'm doing it in part now to affirm my ongoing interest in Lamb, whose Divisio spiralis I'd reviewed here as part of the Kairos album Aggregate Forms in March 2022: I've continued to find Lamb's music useful & appealing, regularly turning to a few pieces from time to time in the interim, so although Parallaxis forma (named after the longest piece on its program, as opposed to so many Lamb albums, which seem to have entirely different names...) doesn't really seem to be a groundbreaking album itself, I do want to trace its relations. In particular, Divisio spiralis (for string quartet) continues to be an amazing piece, and as I've listened to the JACK Quartet rendition more often, I've also come to hear more of the intonation lapses (that Christopher Otto does apologize for in the notes, part of the process of a human rendering...). Still, this fanning, multi-dimensional piece definitely evokes Nada-Brahma for me, sound revealing the mysterious beauty of the universe.... And that's actually typical of Lamb, if most developed (so far) there. Also mentioned then in that long review paragraph were Muto infinitas (2016/18) — also released by Another Timbre, increasingly a major label in the post-Cage space, and increasingly supportive of Lamb specifically — & the Prisma Interius series: Those continue to be my other favorite Lamb pieces, the former (understated) for quarter-tone flute & double bass, but finding endless subtle variation over nearly an hour.... I've listened to this piece dozens of times, and it exemplifies how Lamb's music doesn't lead into stasis, despite its smooth contours: It's indeed constantly changing in shade & color. (The music is thus completely unlike e.g. repetition of rhythmically contoured piano chords, i.e. "traditional minimalism.") And then the latter series climaxes (& ends?) with Prisma Interius IX: I didn't mention that piece specifically before, but it's also been recorded (by Ensemble Dedalus, cited here performing Erik M.'s Fata Morgana in a February 2023 review...) & released by New World Records in 2019, on the album Atmospheres Transparent/Opaque. I did mention a previous recording of VII & VIII though, released by Berlin's Sacred Realism, of which Lamb is a member. (And as it happens, I just mentioned Sacred Realism again here, since Bryan Eubanks recorded Guilherme Rodrigues' Flight Rvw2349, as reviewed earlier this month.... Indeed the coincidences are flying fast, as drummer Todd Capp's Oceans Roar 1000 Drums has just released its second album — today! — Gowanus, recorded last year in Brooklyn. Lamb herself doesn't play "secondary rainbow synthesizer" on the new album though, as she had on their first, i.e. as already mentioned here in that March 2022 review.... Anyway, it's worth noting that the group has connections in New York as well, bringing music of jazzy echoes & perpetual anticipation....) And moreover, Another Timbre has released Translucent Harmonies in this batch too, featuring Lamb's Prisma Interius VIII as half of its program! This is not with the larger chamber ensemble (including the "rainbow" synth, which captures & filters room resonance...) though, but rather the "melodic duo" of the piece (on violin & viola): With the series supposedly being "about" the filter, I'm not sure why the choice. In any case, it's indeed IX that's impressed me most, although I'd be interested to hear the full cycle in a single (unified? I assume that's best...) presentation. Turning back to Parallaxis forma then, the three works on the album all feature voices: I didn't mention Scelsi among the prior Lamb thoughts, but it's worth doing so here, particularly with her vocal music of abstract phonemes & vowel effects (while Scelsi can feature distinctive consonant attacks as well...), but also the slowly shifting microtones in general (of e.g. the Muto infinitas duo). However, Scelsi's works often come off as "miniatures" in comparison to Lamb's extended tapestries, i.e. as messages from other realms (as he put it...) versus the latter's offers to dwell there. That sort of nexus comes off especially with Pulse / Shade (2014) for four voices, actually released earlier this year by "The Present" (on album Ex Utero from Col legno...) too, but performed on Parallaxis forma via computer overlay & manipulation of a single vocalist: The latter was done for practical purposes of precision, especially for the opposite tempi progressions between the parts, and also yields a rendition twice the length.... The title piece had been mentioned in the prior review too, as already released on Norway's Hubro label (in 2019) from Ensemble neoN, and actually that from Explore Ensemble comes off rather more rhetorically, e.g. affectively suggesting despair & then hope (versus the earlier reading, which seems more in line with Lamb's preference for "matter-of-fact" expression — i.e. pace realism?). The most appealing (or at least new) piece on the new album is then probably the shortest, Color / Residua (2016/2020) for three voices & four string instruments, producing more of a composite effect, a sense of voices fluttering, even tricking me into thinking brass instruments appear.... And already in the prior review, I'd mentioned Lamb's teacher Tenney, as well as her influences from Indian dhrupad (itself originally a vocal music...), and these remain evident: Lamb's straightforward ordering of materials contrasts e.g. with the whimsical Cage, even builds to climaxes, i.e. despite the cool or often (e.g. rhythmically) uncontoured "sound" that the two might have in common.... And then the basic opening to sound, the sense of the sacred in sound, of moving beyond a "linear" articulation, beyond the sort of "braiding" I'd mentioned (inadequately) before, brings a kind of "fanning" as already noted above, i.e. a sort of ongoing opening to more (sonic) dimensions via shifting microtonal combinations (& even contrasting tempi...), i.e. continuous plays of consonance & dissonance over the smallest spaces, subtly sheering motion & constant change.... (Indeed, one might evoke the spectral in its double meaning here, again.) And then Lamb does seem to be developing her style, itself already obviously more practical than Tenney's (at times anyway...), since various musicians are releasing multiple versions of her works, i.e. is finding a way to indicate & notate these kinds of microtonal dimensions in ways that make practical sense to performers.... There already does seem to have been much development, in fact, from Parallaxis forma (2016) & then the Prisma Interius series (ending in 2018?), into the imposing Divisio spiralis (2019), and now with Lamb's increasing prestige from a 2020 composition prize (which in part prompted these next recordings, apparently...). So what's to come? (I guess she had e.g. a piece at the British Proms this summer too....) Of course, I'm also usually featuring performers here, less often composers per se. And so I've also noted Lamb as performer, but perhaps I should explicitly mention a previous Another Timbre release, Viola Torros (from 2019, seemingly a peak Lamb year...) with Johnny Chang (with each on viola), including as supplemented by e.g. rainbow synth for Lamb's Prisma Interius VI — although that earlier double album does still feel less multi-dimensional....

Turning to an album released earlier in the year, recorded (in Berlin) only last November (so still less than a year ago...), Conundrum presents a sophisticated quintet interaction between Ernesto Rodrigues (here on violin), Guilherme Rodrigues, Ernesto's longtime colleague Nuno Torres (on alto sax), and German masters Alexander von Schlippenbach & Willi Kellers. I didn't review the album when it appeared, in large part due to the fame of von Schlippenbach — & because of course I already write so often about Rodrigues. Besides that I'm always turning away from piano here then, particularly beyond equal temperament (& indeed a relatively traditional piano sound is involved...), I simply didn't believe that these well-established musicians "needed" my attention. But then I started to fret that Conundrum wasn't getting enough attention elsewhere, because I do find it to be a rather compelling synthesis... with substantially polyphonic interactions & various active allusions. So as I'd also alluded in the review of Hunt at the Brook Again from September, my own aesthetic narrative takes me back to various (productive) familiarities, styles & combos that I particularly enjoy (& in which I've invested time...), even as I might be telling myself that I want to diversify more.... And there's an authenticity to discussing what one enjoys, so it's not something I want to dismiss in any way, but there's also a drive toward exploration that familiarities can blunt.... In any case, not that I have the (supernatural) ability to speak for anyone else anyway, but I'm still no expert on Schlippenbach's extensive & impressive career as an improvising pianist. Nor was I an expert on Günter "Baby" Sommer when I had the opportunity to write the liner notes for the release of the Rodrigueses' quartet album with Sommer, Not Bad (recorded in June 2022 & released in January 2023), but I could talk there a bit about differing generations & continuing to build new worlds.... I also didn't do justice to horn player Gonçalo Mortágua for that discussion, who I came to realize was basically making his debut — in an album featuring the Rodrigues approach to extended string timbres & spectral harmonies, while evoking e.g. a "world vibe" (which can be said of jazz in general, I suppose...). It also involved a relatively linear presentation of musical ideas... unlike Conundrum, which tackles more in the way of vertical dimensions & modes of harmonic motion. (There're some real jazz evocations from members of the quintet briefly too, but also quite a bit of prickly polyphonic intensity amid shifting timbres.) Conundrum certainly doesn't involve anyone's debut either, as these are all very experienced improvising musicians. And while I don't have much experience myself e.g. with Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra, or really as much focus on Ernesto's larger ensembles either, the two obviously come with extensive experience in forging larger groups, surely part of what makes this quintet session almost immediately flow.... (Despite my disclaimers, I've actually mentioned Schlippenbach a few times here: He'd appeared with Red Dhal Sextet, as reviewed in February 2014, as well as was noted with the quintet Intricacies — along with Kellers — from May 2015.... And Kellers himself first appeared here with the Grid Mesh quartet, as reviewed in November 2013.) And then let me highlight Torres (b.1977) a little more: Appearing on a variety of Rodrigues releases, going back here e.g. to New Dynamics (recorded in 2016) or Setúbal (reviewed in May 2020), Torres is able to play low in textures (e.g. spectrally, i.e. with a sense of geometric acoustics), but also can conjure more soloistic jazzy expression when needed. (The harmonics relation is also a little different here, because Ernesto is on violin, i.e. often higher in the texture.) Conundrum then appears to be the first recording of a little tour that Torres did with the two Rodrigueses (who were maybe also taking up the "legends" theme from Not Bad...) last November, with Conspiratorial and fulminate things happen (reviewed this May) & Brecht (mentioned in a January review) already appearing here, but there's also e.g. the more distended Letters to Milena.... And finally the title, Conundrum (with tracks named e.g. for mythical monsters...), does seem (perhaps) to refer to the challenges of combining tempered keyboard with contemporary spectral-timbral string concerns: Some old-fashioned (or "classic...") qualities reappear, but the result is surprisingly taut yet fluid as well, generally with much assertive momentum. It almost seems as though they've been playing together for a long time (as the saying goes...).

Then appearing just this weekend from Poland's Fundacja Sluchaj, Duot with Strings (from a duo plus a quartet, yielding a sextet) presents some similar interactions & textures at times: The group is once again acoustic, but showing a distinct "ea" awareness (as even some of Rodrigues' all-acoustic releases are labeled...), no piano, but a string & percussion combination that almost suggests prepared piano at times.... Duot with Strings, recorded in Portugal in December 2021, also suggests a more open-ended exploration, between poles of smooth distension & crunchy counterpoint, which they execute with great fluidity. Indeed, this basic dynamic describes the Duot duo (i.e. Albert Cirera on saxophones & Ramon Prats on drums, launching with the album Duot from 2007, there still feeling explicitly jazzy at times...) already, as the two musicians' other work suggests as well: They were joined by Agustí Fernández to form Liquid Trio (& e.g. Liquid Quintet in turn... pace e.g. a review of The Liquid Trio Plays Bernoulli here in January 2018), but Cirera e.g. plays together with bassist Alvaro Rosso (& guitarist Abdul Moimême) in Dissection Room as well (as reviewed here in October 2018), the two senses of musical dissection & liquification operating together for Duot with Strings.... And they're operated along with the string quartet ZARM, formed by Carlos Zingaro (together with David Alves, also on violin, Ulrich Mitzlaf on cello — & Rosso) to explore a similar polar nexus, in that case stated to be sacred-profane. (And while David Alves was unknown to me, Mitzlaf had appeared e.g. with Zingaro on Chant from 2015, i.e. in another strings-focused ensemble.... Rosso is, of course, a veteran of the Lisbon String Trio. And do note further that this "jazz string quartet" is unusual in retaining the classic two violins, instead substituting double bass for viola/alto!) The result is then not only different senses of smoothness, including a sense at times that crunchy counterpoint can emerge within smoothness, but different sorts of polyphonic juxtapositions & even e.g. parallel (sometimes extended...) lines. Per the previous entry then, these two groups come together as a strong combination, one that seems made for each other (including with horn lying low at times...) — & a combination that often yields results rather different from historical styles or genres. There's a sense of growling mystery to open, but big echoing drums come along soon enough, active strings (including harmonics), and really no sense that one of the groups is dominating (or is more "fundamental" than...) the other. There's a sense of ritual then, of conjuring (interpenetrating) modes of intensity. And then the overall affective outcome seems to be in senses of transition (& indeed liminality) — itself a growing theme here of late (pace Braxton's ZIM & many other efforts), but distinctively expressed over six (thematic?) tracks on Duot with Strings (with space for more to come...).

As long as I'm thinking about albums featuring bowed strings, let me turn now to violist Jessica Pavone (b.1976) & her new album Clamor, recorded this year in Manhattan by Pavone's regular string ensemble (here a sextet), with guest soloist Katherine Young for the middle two (of four) tracks. Much to my surprise, I hadn't actually mentioned Pavone in this space yet, although I'd heard her in various music, including of course with Anthony Braxton. I guess the earlier "J. Pavone String Ensemble" albums, while exploring rich string textures & various harmonic ideas, also seemed both relatively repetitive & tonal — pace the Terry Riley reference often associated with Pavone's composed music. So contra e.g. Catherine Lamb's composed music (as reviewed here most recently last month...), there're more echoes of popular or ambient music from Pavone, meaning that although there's no shortage of harmonic relations being investigated, there's less of a strict sense of abstract spreading dimensionality.... There's still a sense of spatiality at times on Clamor though, particularly when higher or lower pitches are involved, even as its potency is more often in the affective-harmonic relational (emotional) domain. And it's quite a potent album, leaving a thundering silence when it concludes, intensely affective at times — especially around Young's howling bassoon, the ensuing liminal textures (with the strings) really prompting this review, i.e. more so than the more tonal-modulating framing pieces... — indeed seeming to take Pavone's compositional activity to a new level. Pavone has been quite prolific then, but as the generally smoother & abstract textures of her earlier string ensemble work give way to more rhetorical dynamism, its affectivity rises..... So maybe I should've already mentioned ... of Late (released last year) here, as it launches with newly assertive intensity, although ends up seeming less substantial overall: There the "string ensemble" is pared to a trio (again incorporating some vocalizing, as typical of Pavone... including for her solo viola album from Relative Pitch early last year, When No One Around You is There but Nowhere to be Found...). A previous "structural" precedent for Clamor can be noted in Lull (released in 2021) as well: That outing involves a string octet, plus drum & trumpet soloists on some tracks, but Clamor seems that much more fluid (as did ... of Late). And then Young is someone I'd noted here also with Braxton (e.g. DCWM), while the string ensemble consists of Pavone herself (also a soloist...) with Aimée Niemann (violin), Charlotte Munn-Wood (violin), Abby Swidler (viola), Mariel Roberts (cello, a soloist too...) & Shayna Dulberger (double bass). (And I'd actually noted the latter two, respectively in trio with Apocalypso in September 2013, and with Nate Wooley — a soloist from Lull — in Mutual Aid Music, as reviewed here in May 2021.) There's then a bit of folksy quality to Clamor at times as well — differing e.g. from Precepts (moving farther afield...), itself also composed music (with much performer freedom...) highlighting strings, or say Compassion & Evidence, a more improvisational & electronic exploration that nonetheless brings some similar long-form textural combos... — but then also a strong, even Scelsian sense of energy modulation (particularly evocative around bassoon...), i.e. of real instability & emergence.... And that's the theme then, technologies that women have developed over the centuries in order to overcome restrictions forced upon them.... (So I also need to state a decolonial perspective: It was modern imperialism that established patriarchy as the global norm. Indeed e.g. Brazilian theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos posits that capturing the output of women's labor was effectively the main goal of modern imperialism, such that these days I sarcastically remark that the major marketing slogan for the West has become "The best patriarchy for women!" Any implication of "progress" in general thus worries me....) So there is indeed an exploration of new worlds here, but still with a sense of building to climaxes & release. And obviously a basic musical arc of this sort can't help but suggest sexual release per se (as it long has...), even as the result is sometimes more of a falling apart or a coming unwound.... (Note e.g. that the new Polwechsel vinyl survey, Embrace, specifically eschews a climax-release dynamic, including per its included discussion.... So that long-running, compositional-improvisation group marks a sort of polar opposite.) Clamor thus continues to suggest various senses of building — along with its senses of change (& even of decay).

Of course musicians playing bowed strings are regular contributors to many improvisation outings these days, especially prolifically in Portugal around Ernesto Rodrigues — branching out there variously as well, with e.g. bassist João Madeira (& I've yet to see a real bio...) suddenly becoming one of Rodrigues' most frequent & dynamic colleagues over the past couple of years (including e.g. for their most recent album together, Dripping with Dirk Serries & José Oliveira, apparently inspired by the physical process itself, i.e. not unusually for projects involving Madeira...). Madeira has created a label (4DaRecord, with physical CDs) as well, and he's already released some intriguing material there, including from younger musicians (& not always including himself). But here I want to feature the soon-to-be-released trio album Open in Finder — with flautist Carlos Bechegas (b.1957) & cellist Ulrich Mitzlaff. So as it happened, the latter had only just appeared in this space with ZARM (i.e. another Portuguese string ensemble, arising from the pre-Rodrigues generation with Carlos Zingaro...) & Duot with Strings in a review last month.... But "Bechegas" (his name quoted in the credits here, not unlike "Zingaro" at times, although I don't know the rest...) was basically new to me, despite that he's apparently been around the improvisation scene for decades, his first prominent album being Open Secrets with Peter Kowald (while mostly releasing duos with bassists from that era...). There's a lengthy intervening interval with no releases, however, interrupted first (& only this year) by another trio album with strings, Secrets under Trees with both Rodrigueses — recorded in Germany in June 2023, but released last month prior to Open in Finder, itself recorded the month prior in Lisbon, both live... — featuring naturalistic concerns & inspirations around flute & strings textures, a counterpoint of overlapping lines & ongoing continuities, pushing forward virtuosically into exotic spectra & especially around outdoorsy evocations. (And I should note that the first "Carlos Bechegas Trio" release from Leo Labs in 1997 was with both Rodrigues & Oliveira! Bechegas employed electronics there as well, as opposed to these later acoustic albums....) There's also a wonderful ability not only to propel forward, but to slow time as well displayed on Secrets under Trees, an album title that also differs from most others from Bechegas in not beginning with "Open..." (& yet nonetheless returns to Open Secrets as touchstone...). So Open in Finder displays those qualities as well, with the strings shifted a range lower, and worked into more of a four-movement quasi-symphonic form, i.e. offering more (in number) expressive arcs than provided by the long-short ("tone poem") format of Secrets under Trees.... And a general sense of openness does seem to underlie Open in Finder too, from its mysteriously evolving start coming to include various string harmonics (sounding almost electronic at times...), and through a series of solo expressions that seem then to be extended by others, again often in overlapping lines, sometimes thinning textures, but also into a more bustling polyphony (or even e.g. quasi-unison glissandi...) at times. The virtuosic solo emphasis can sometimes recall Robert Dick too & e.g. his tour-de-force trio album Solar Wind, especially early in both interactions, there using a "variant" string instrument, while flute expression per se here might be compared also to Camilo Ángeles (e.g. in trio on Aqrabuamelu per a November 2022 review, or in duo with cello — an instrument central to both recent Bechegas albums — on El Espesor del Sueño, as noted subsequently here in a review of Vol. II this past April...). And although there're other examples, including from composed music, this combination still seems underexplored to me.... An emphasis on continuity-through-change remains tangible for Open in Finder as well then, including through a subtly rich & evolving pointillism that comes to animate (& involute) the long second movement, there indeed yielding a pastoral vibe, but with urban invocations elsewhere, including through & into nocturnal scenes (among a series of extended & adventurous textures...), naturalistic at times (once again...), but coming to suggest a more human-centered dynamic & perspective overall. Echoes of dance consequently arise & evolve too (perhaps figuring human animation per se...). The result is then multi-faceted, a social statement, and apparently a return to music production for Bechegas, seeming to end in a question....

Returning next to a classic format, Puna — recorded in a Berlin studio in January 2021 — is actually the first release from a "guitar trio" consisting of Olaf Rupp, Meinrad Kneer & Rudi Fischerlehner. And guitarist Rupp has been something of a fixture here, most recently with the quasi-shamanic Myotis Myotis duo (reviewed November 2022), but e.g. regularly with Ernesto Rodrigues (e.g. around RRR, as first discussed in August 2018...), and back all the way to an entry from late 2011.... The other two are hardly unknowns, Fischerlehner most recently appearing here with the (also relatively traditional) trombone trio Der Dritte Stand (reviewed July 2022), and Kneer e.g. playing a "connecting" role on longtime favorite Colophony (from 2013).... Of course, Rupp & Fischerlehner have a long-running duo, Xenofox (whose most recent album The Garden Was Empty was recorded in May 2022, but released already in February this year... indeed showing the aftereffects of Puna), but that connection was strangely omitted from the release notes from Vienna's Klanggalerie. The latter also seems to be one of the few labels prominent in this space to mostly be eschewing download or streaming releases (per e.g. Skein's Spectra & Affrays, as noted here in a January 2023 review — or apparently Density Dots from a new Dirk Serries quintet, about to appear...), but then not for Puna — for unknown reasons! Beyond this point of confusion though, Klanggalerie seems to be undertaking more releases in this particular arena (amid their large catalog...), albeit generally in more "classic" guises than some other freely adventurous labels.... And Puna does have something of a classic quality, given its instrumentation, as well as what seems to be a desire from the trio to make a "statement" release — again (per the previous entry) suggesting something of symphonic form, with more gestural-procedural (& rock-ish) inner movements, but more varied (& pointillistic) textures in the more extended & balanced outer movements.... Per Xenofox then, which can almost be succinct via their long experience together, there're echoes of rock music to be found here, especially explicitly to open the third track, but often more subsumed (if already irrupting by the end of the long first track...), particularly within those outer movements, where clattering metallic percussion often pairs with throbbing pizzicato bass — & pace recent entries featuring improvising strings, it's more often a "jazz bass" from Kneer here — guitar often being in (ringing) plucking-percussive mode itself.... (A variety of bent tones is employed across the ensemble, plus e.g. hand drums & a big bass drum from early on....) Given Rupp's methods around figural clusters in spectral-harmonic motion & Fischerlehner's often rock-infused drumming then, there's also considerable energy coursing through Puna, yielding quite fast (& detailed) passagework at times, such that my main comparison has to be with the massive Ewen / Smith / Walter (II)... both albums suggesting more than a hint of punk, as well as involving long-term collaborations. (Or maybe I should note Minus X, the Xenakis double tribute album from guitarists Sharp & Kaiser, reviewed here in June: There's certainly no shortage of activity there either!) So there's a tremendous degree of simultaneous motion across the four movements of Puna, although varying in its orientations & intensities (including via a more mellow, yet echoing, vibe at times...), thus forging a sort of thorny musical jungle (of various allusions)... as a broad working-through of (quasi-jazz? & beyond...) guitar trio textures.

Although it seems as though I only just reviewed vibraphonist Sergio Armaroli's Windows & Mirrors | Milano Dialogues (last December...), it also seems that there's more to say: I recently cited his basic sound world again in a review of Harri Sjöström's Due Mutabili (in September), and then finally took note of the "About Cage" series he curates for Da Vinci Classics (consequently updating my Number Pieces discussion last week...). And then Armaroli & colleagues continued to release albums from the same Windows & Mirrors sessions from April 2022: First there was More Windows & Small Mirrors | Milano Dialogues, part two (released this past February), involving the same quartet with Giancarlo Schiaffini & Veli Kujala, but more often in reduced formations (i.e. almost as an appendix to the prior quartet-focused album...). Now there's the generically named More Duos And Trios, released last month also on Leo Records, and recently appearing on streaming outlets: The title obviously references one of the earlier Armaroli recordings for Leo, Duos & Trios (released in 2020, as noted in my December 2022 review...), and does involve again that prior trio (i.e. without Kujala on accordion). And although the title sounds almost like an afterthought, More Duos And Trios ends up being the tightest release yet from this project! Whereas the first Duos & Trios seemed to be largely about integrating Sjöström into Armaroli's musical world (i.e. alongside Schiaffini, who appears e.g. on the Cage series, as well as with Armaroli for some of the releases in another extensive series, that one "jazzier" on the Italian Dodicilune label...), Windows & Mirrors | Milano Dialogues had then involved integrating Kujala, and ends up involving some relatively empty landscapes, spacious & hovering at times, also exploratory.... (Schiaffini on trombone had appeared as well on the other Armaroli quartet album that I reviewed in the interim, I Dream I Was An Earopean, recorded later in April 2022 with vocalist Phil Minton....) But More Duos And Trios is a second outing for the core trio, and usually ends up in strongly three-way interactions, i.e. exploring its basic reed & brass & vibes setup via increasingly sophisticated ensemble articulations.... Indeed it comes to recall In Search of Surprise (reviewed here in November 2021) from Udo Schindler & Etienne Rolin on horns, there contextualized by "adding" vibes at times (pace their duo followup, Plastic Narratives as mentioned in another February review...), generally punchier & more angular as well — as one of many prescient textural studies from Schindler. More Duos And Trios also continues to imply a sense of being "studies" then, i.e. with no real theme otherwise, various restarts for the tracks, simply coming to an end in time... but there're plenty of other recent explorations of this general sound world, lending a sense of centrality to Armaroli's work: When discussing both Windows & Mirrors & In Search of Surprise I'd noted the textural-structural similarities to Anthony Braxton's DCWM, i.e. two "horns" with worlds split-articulated across shimmering electronics — now for others, substituting shimmering vibes (possibly along with accordion, subsequently embraced by Braxton as well for ZIM...), with the basic resulting textures being increasingly interrogated across various musical contexts. Indeed, not only has Evan Parker been exploring similar combos (including with Armaroli himself, as previously noted...), but e.g. Steve Lehman & Ivo Perelman just released large ensemble albums augmenting a similar basic trio with vibraphone (although with trumpet, i.e. brass in higher register), respectively Ex Machina (with "orchestra," including electronics...) & Seven Skies Orchestra (with string trio). Perelman enjoyed the combo so much that he subsequently recorded the focused duo Tuning Forks with Matt Moran (as released in September), seemingly turning more toward spectral approaches around ringing metal.... But one thing those efforts do have in common, including from Braxton (who offers some different configurations as well...), is that they're driven by a reed player (including sometimes Sjöström...). With Armaroli though, it's more as if the "computer" (or continuo...) background is leading, so there's a different sense of structure, of articulating extended (temporal) tapestries.... (And these are also very long albums, most well over an hour, meaning that there's no shortage of ideas either.) More Duos And Trios is also, perhaps, the final release for Leo Records, an institution in this space. (It comes alongside the appealing Density For Solo Vibraphone(s), much less discrete in its rhythmic-dynamic articulations, making a round number of 10 releases for Leo by Armaroli....) And I'd already mentioned in the first Armaroli review how changes to commercial regulations left Leo unable to ship product to the US, and I guess he doesn't want to shift to more of an online context now, although as noted, his recent albums do appear at least on Qobuz.... That's unfortunate, but new music does continue.... And indeed Armaroli becomes one of the most prolific builders of what seems to be an important (technical, acoustic) sound world for the 2020s — so when does this "study" work yield more of an artistic statement per se? Armaroli's solo work may already be there, but that's not really my focus....

Continuing a sort of textural nexus explored in this space of late, as well as reprising an ensemble from an already noted album, in this case moving to the more singular title Archangel — itself recorded in September 2022 — from the more generic (but detailed...) Music for Two Organs & Two Bass Clarinets (as reviewed here in May 2018), Thanos Chrysakis returns alongside historical organist Peer Schlechta & their respective colleagues on low-range clarinets, Chris Cundy & Ove Volquartz. This is the first post-pandemic, improvised album from Chrysakis (here credited on chamber organ & voice — the latter subtly on only one track...) & his Aural Terrains label then, e.g. after most recently Five Shards (recorded in 2019 & reviewed here in August 2021, as a "garden of horns cultivated by Chrysakis," i.e. with more timbral variety — & likewise more dynamic instability — than his usual deep reed focus lately...), but also after Music for Baritone Saxophone, Bass Clarinets & Electronics (also recorded in 2017, i.e. not long after Music for Two Organs & Two Bass Clarinets...). And while Archangel shows considerable development from the quartet's first album, becoming both more intricate & more immersive, it does retain a jazzier quality at times, particularly from the reeds, which are after all played by different musicians from those on Music for Baritone... — the latter with its close (textural) emphasis on reed grains, yielding a sort of overall (non-jazzy) smoothness.... It also turns out that Schlechta & Volquartz had only recently released another quartet album together, Cadenza del Crepusculo (recorded in November 2021, so prior to Archangel...) with John Hughes (bass — & actually a bassist on the enigmatic Pail Bug, discussed here at length in March 2012...) & Gianni Mimmo (soprano sax). Of course, the latter had only just appeared in this space with Due Mutabili (reviewed back in September), also released on his Amirani Records. One of the more striking aspects of Archangel, relative to the quartet's first album, is then its pairing of high pitches with the big organ bass (forging an immersive atmosphere overall, against which the clarinets exchange calls & sometimes jazzy lines between...), but Cadenza del Crepusculo (like the earlier quartet with Schlechta...) emphasizes more of the bass in general, i.e. from the pedals up, a growling flow, often seeming low & anticipatory.... I also saw the result described as "medieval" elsewhere, so need to add that Schlechta's specialty is early Baroque organs, i.e. historically tuned in versions of mean-tone yielding to well-temperaments, so very different from Pythagorean tuning with its ringing perfect fifths. (Mean-tone is almost exactly the opposite, whereas 12tet is very close to 3:2 fifths again....) And I can't really pick out the precise tuning on Archangel, but there appears to be a historical temperament at work, which actually contributes to the feeling of "immersion" involved (as buoyed by the chamber organ, presumably a synthesizer with variable tunings, "framing" the acoustic space with high pitches...). So besides the more idiomatic expression from the reed players, that's a key difference from Music for Baritone..., the latter invoking (relatively speaking) a sort of smoothness that relies (apparently) on 12tet. (Among favorites here, Sitsa may be the most similar in terms of combining organ to frame space, there with an eerie sheering quality, plenty of suspension, but also yielding a "smooth" feel overall....) So that aspect suggests a comparison with Werckmeister Musik (recorded in 2019) & its specific Baroque tuning (& synth sometimes sounding like organ...), there also yielding an immersive sense of flowing waves.... (The "bent" feel of the unequal temperament thus suggests a kind of envelopment — i.e. forges a territory via its internal contradiction.) Like Sitsa though, Werckmeister Musik suggests a rather more "industrial" context, i.e. versus the clear (evocation of a) church organ on Archangel. The latter aspect can be found interrogated by e.g. Tuning Out as well, but with the historical tuning further problematized (i.e. used differently from intended...) & rendered more often into pointillistic interactions. So that differs from the typically flowing (albeit with some clashes & stoppages...) & immersive quality of Archangel, itself seeming to take up various textural currents, especially (if indirectly...) from Anthony Braxton & DCWM, specifically here with the organ pair (versus e.g. vibraphone, or vibraphone plus accordion, pace the previous entry...) forging a similar sort of shimmering-glittering background tapestry, sometimes with clarinets blending more into the texture then, but more often in relief or recitative, i.e. projecting a sort of rhetorical-jazzy horn interaction as framed by various held tones, low & high. And Braxton does project a jazziness from his horns often enough as well, so that aspect is similar — even as I prefer the more "integrated" passages on Archangel: The big opening organ entry is dramatic, soon into senses of falling (as tuning is subtly implicated...), clarinets cautious at first, eventually coming more to the fore.... (And for the final track, Cundy turns to ocarina instead, adding another interrogation of the highs, yielding some differing textures, provocative again, but still relatively preliminary....) There's thus almost a sense that church music is yielding to jazz. (And of course this sort of fusion was already accomplished differently in the 20th century via gospel, i.e. with the organ-guitar trio....) But Archangel is also long (more than an hour... & available as well from Cundy's Bandcamp), and while it's certainly more sophisticated than the interaction on Music for Two Organs & Two Bass Clarinets (from five & a half years prior... itself still with e.g. "jazzy chords" from chamber organ...), there're still plenty of passages that seem to be routine continuations or more tentative ongoing explorations.... So will the quartet be ready for more in another five years? Or maybe this basic combination will be coming back sooner? There's enough to Archangel that one can really hear the potential (particularly given e.g. the spatial possibilities raised).

Moving in a different & more traditional horn & drums direction, albeit less traditional with flute (again), while also reprising an earlier formation, The House On The Hill (recorded only this past June & recently released by Shrike Records) is at least the third album from a trio of Adrian Northover (soprano sax), Marcello Magliocchi (drums & percussion) & Bruno Gussoni (flutes): I'd included their first (to my knowledge...), The Sea Of Frogs (recorded in 2019 & released by Plus Timbre) in a double review around Northover, together with Xoo (with guitarist Daniel Thompson, an album around which I'd eventually start to foreground critical language around zoomimesis...), and it maintains more the dynamic of a horn & drums duo (also with some actual duo tracks...), doubled up sometimes. That's not so unlike the way that Runcible Quintet started off functioning as a double trio around Magliocchi — with Runcible (also with Northover) as an obvious reference point, their most recent album Three (recorded in 2019) having been reviewed here in May 2020.... That's with flautist Neil Metcalfe (whose participation on the recently released, but also recorded in 2019, Hunt at the Brook Again & with Neil Metcalfe not only reconnects him with Thompson, but embraces a similar sort of pointillism as opens The House On The Hill....), with the developing trio texture of Gussoni (b.1951) instead joining Northover & Magliocchi suggesting developments from Runcible nonetheless: Textures are more pared down here, i.e. without strings, so more airy, particularly for the trio's second album A Castle of Ghosts (recorded & released in 2022, also on Plus Timbre), there moving already into the world of post-pandemic recordings via a relatively open & atmospheric format... slowly building, but also de-tensioning at times. And then The House On The Hill opens with more incisive rhythmic emphasis, quickly pointillistic, seemingly more ambitious (than e.g. the solo "world music" flute opening A Castle of Ghosts...), but also moving more into flowing lines & (still airy) vertical textures at times, a sense of haunting indeed continuing to suggest itself.... And Gussoni is increasingly integrated into the proceedings by this point, yielding a distinctive (but subtle...) collective trio sound that nonetheless proceeds into areas of more extended techniques for some tracks, still retaining a sense of overall coherence across the variously evocative titles. (Of course flute has been a specific attraction here, so The House On The Hill suggests a comparison with the recent Open in Finder from Carlos Bechegas et al., as reviewed earlier this month — there with strings, and so embracing a completely different technology from this more "primitivist" trio recording in Italy....) So there's a sense of physical acoustics increasingly coming to the fore here, less zoomimesis or animalistic (or humanistic...) aspects of "anthropology music" per se, but more a sense of space or structure, e.g. a corrugated metal shanty rattling in the wind... a sort of detailed & impressionistic mix of shading & varying dynamism, closely attended. And Gussoni has been active since the 1960s (including e.g. with Peter Kowald, per his resume, pace the recent Bechegas discussion...), but this seems to be his most prominent release so far this millennium: The House On The Hill ends up evoking (non-idiomatic) "world music" then, and in a rather gritty & (e.g. physically) material way. The trio thus further develops a style projecting the beauty of everyday (& mostly outdoor) sounds.

Animals & Giraffes @ Medicine for Nightmares is then also the third album from the (extended) duo, released this week on Phillip Greenlief's Evander Music (& Bandcamp). And as opposed to the obvious comparison here, 13 Asperities from Gabriele Guenther & Trokaan Project (released in 2020), which involved mostly an established group of instrumentalists who also set a general tone (as well as continuity...) from the start, Animals & Giraffes continues to be very centered on poet & speaker Claudia La Rocco. This remains just as true of @ Medicine for Nightmares — recorded in San Francisco in September 2022 — even though a variety of other performers is involved, including others on backing vocals (& e.g. electronics). The latter aren't really textual though, per La Rocco's matter-of-fact quick turn of phrase style, but rather join the instrumentalists (including oboe & bass) in coloring the various intervening passages, almost as a series of little vignettes. Hence the long-range "continuity" is left to La Rocco, whose musical unmusicality (or at least unpitched-ness) is felt in cyclic returns of various textual snippets, forging a surreal atmosphere of overlapping déjà vu over two masterfully woven (mostly separate) sets. The result is highly potent, even dizzying, despite the superficial blandness — even if the musical parts wouldn't really make for an album by themselves (although they feature some quite extended textures in some moments... without development). Despite the varying instrumental or vocal forces at various points then (with Greenlief as ongoing partner...), @ Medicine for Nightmares is also La Rocco's most traditional album in terms of presentation: The first from Animals & Giraffes, July (released in 2017 on Edgetone Records) prominently included her conducting an interview, while the second, Landlocked Beach (reviewed here in April 2018) included live radio callers (to whom she responds capriciously): That bizarre album, released by Creative Sources, is also rather long (& edited from a much longer radio program...), including Jon Leidecker (on electronics) as third member. I thought at the time that some of the looping might have been from electronics, but it certainly seems at this point to be from La Rocco herself (& July had already involved a variety of instrumentalists for the different tracks as well). Per Greenlief then (who describes himself as working on the post-jazz continuum, a description I enjoy... & who likely has plenty to do with the time concepts here as well), @ Medicine for Nightmares — & I'd suggest hearing the two sets one at a time — involves "other worldly electro-acoustic textures and a theater of voices," and a good deal of that is transformational or liminal material around La Rocco, adding to the spinning senses of intersecting time. (The additional performers include Kyle Bruckmann, who's appeared in this space already — along with newcomers Alexandra Buschman Roman & Adriana Camacho Torres.) So these recitals do continue to feel affectively transformative to me, but not in a straightforward direction: La Rocco seems to capture (with deceptive flatness — or actuality, that is...) some sort of tangible post-post- (transverse, becoming minor...) vibe that's amplified along the way via held tones & little splashes of color from her musician colleagues.

Jack Wright (b.1942) has been one of the seminal free improvisors in the US, particularly as a sax player. And in recent years, while he's still touring live, Wright has mainly (or even exclusively?) been performing & recording with a relatively small group of younger initiates. Both continued with his latest trio album Yaw, recorded in Mississippi during a July 2022 tour by his trio Wrest, featuring Evan Lipson & Ben Bennett. Based upon many hours of musical explorations together then, Wrest develops a unique & personal collective style, building considerably since their previous album Ingress (collected from three different tour dates in 2014...). Wrest is also a "classic sax trio" by configuration, so confronts a considerable tradition with novel textures & dynamic means for interacting. But as far as context, there're actually three musicians circling Wright these days (with guitarist Zach Darrup), so there're actually three different corresponding trios (all named!): Never, with Bennett & Darrup released Never (as reviewed here that September) in 2019, also on Bennett's Palliative Records, and then Not Nothing (also recorded in 2019, live in Chicago), there with some twang from the electric guitar (versus the acoustic trio Wrest). And Roughhousing, with Darrup & Lipson, released a trio (recorded live in Tennessee) on You Haven't Heard This (reviewed here in March 2017), itself arriving alongside Wright's book The Free Musics. Finally, there's a fourth trio minus Wright himself, Virtual Balboa, which released Petrichor (as a quartet, adding trumpet, as reviewed here in November 2021) on Creative Sources. There're also various duos, an especially notable recent example in this context being Augur from Wright & Bennett (made in studio a month after Yaw, August 2022), a lengthy & relatively stark album, very closely recorded.... (Percussionist Bennett is surely the most visible member of this cohort otherwise.) However, Wright has yet to record with the full quartet — pace e.g. The Unrepeatable Quartet (released back in 2013, from a different group). But he does have a new solo album, What is What on Relative Pitch, recorded in March 2023 — also apparently originally set to include material from July 2022 as well. (Wright's solo style is highly conversational, i.e. as if he's talking to himself, complete with alternations etc....) And bassist Lipson has probably been the least visible of these performers since You Haven't Heard This, but did release a "statement" solo album earlier this year too, Echo Chamber on Public Eyesore, exploring a dark acoustic space.... A sense of "acoustics" does shine through on Yaw then, as well as various percussive qualities arising from all three musicians (as Lipson had demonstrated extensively in solo as well...), combined with various extended howls & calls — a broad zoomimesis invoking amphibians & insects too... — so as to produce an active (& highly biological, but also e.g. with a train...) sense of outdoor landscape. Wright has long opined that the Southeast is "the best" part of the US for free improvisation (i.e. for audiences being open to the musical unknown...), and he captures here a considerable swath of its "natural" (sometimes eerie...) sounds. As the comment might suggest as well, his music sounds relatively unlike e.g. English efforts (including those that might otherwise be described similarly...) & indeed the "urban elite" musics in general. There's always a sense of pushing or stretching in all directions, a thirst for new (collective) sounds & how to articulate them together in a new way, but also a sort of swampy earthiness. (The living landscape starts to converse with itself: This seems very North American to me, in part contrasting with the fire & sky of jazz....) And Lipson's emergence contributes considerably to the overall impression here, particularly in tackling the "sax trio" format per se: I do take the "classic" combos seriously, i.e. the history that they have, and so this release brings a little extra gravity (pace Wright trio releases in general, which are always an event...), even as the result isn't bound by traditional idiom. So for further context, I last reviewed two sax trio albums in July, Nail in Ulrichsberg (with Michel Doneda) & Here and How (with John Butcher), and then if one can accept cello (for bass), since flipping this page, there's been Flight Rvw2349 (with Georg Wissel).... And as with most Wright releases, one of course wonders what one isn't hearing, Yaw having been selected for release from a concert tour: After various intense sequences, it also ends quietly, i.e. suggesting a lingering buzz of insects, such that I usually find myself wishing there was more....

Turning to another horn trio, this time (again) around clarinet: Guillermo Gregorio (b.1941, originally from Argentina) has been active for decades too, including various earlier releases with which I have only limited familiarity. And although it wasn't his first mention here, Gregorio was actually featured in Jeff Shurdut's Kitchen Music Live Off-Broadway (that I helped produce, and then discussed extensively here in August 2015...), prompted in part by his past interactions with Fluxus: Jeff hasn't been putting music before the public lately, but that relation does continue to evoke the visual arts, around which Clifford Allen also orients his liner note comments for The Cold Arrow, Gregorio's latest album — recorded in the St. Louis area in September 2022, with Damon Smith & Jerome Bryerton (as released on Smith's Balance Point Acoustics). Allen specifically cites constructivism, and as a one-time mathematician, I might suggest the field of projective geometry, "planar effect" being an operative notion here, per track titles. And The Cold Arrow is not the first (recent) release by this trio either, with Room of the Present having appeared on Sluchaj in 2021, although recorded back in Chicago in 2007 & 2008.... Both programs are based around Gregorio compositions, but most of the music is improvised, and for that earlier album, Bryerton (whom I hadn't mentioned here, but who's appeared multiple times alongside Smith, himself of course increasingly a pillar of US improv...) includes some big drums, whereas the credits for The Cold Arrow state clearly that no drums were used — it's all metal, gongs & cymbals, etc. So the style becomes more austere. And that austerity is often articulated more in shifting resonances & slower textures (after e.g. a shrill & aggressive opening... as if already in the middle of something), not really in varieties of pointillism, e.g. per Smith's "other" clarinet trio (with Jason Stein), as cited here in a review (from February 2022) of their Volumes & Surfaces. (In fact, that was my previous discussion of clarinet trios in general, a format for which Smith is suddenly at the center here... that same later trio having also just released Hum, a live followup recorded in 2022.) The trio's dynamism & level of intensity seems to shift often & seamlessly then... indeed with a sense that some "larger" structure is being projected onto the linear-temporal space. This sort of "surfaces" (pace Smith's other trio...) approach would seem to be typical of Gregorio then, who also just happened to release Two Trios on ESP-Disk' as well — both pre-pandemic performances, the first with his long-running Chicago trio (with cello & vibraphone), mostly from before my time here... but also anticipating some horn & vibes (& related) interactions that I've been discussing in this space lately. And although there're some pricklier passages coming & going on both albums, there's also a sense of linear (yet angular) melody usually maintained by Gregorio (pace e.g. tuneful reedists such as Schindler & Perelman...). The result can be mysteriously affective, generally in bold strokes suddenly at different angles (mostly calm... often rhetorically flat), various blocks of (ritualistic) stasis suddenly yielding to something more animated & forward moving again... which somehow progresses to a new stasis. Much of this continues to suggest late 20th century high modernism to me, with the style becoming more starkly contoured & refined (but not minimalistic).

Back in December 2017, I reviewed The Core-Tet Project featuring classical percussionist Evelyn Glennie as part of an improvising quartet: The project intrigued me not only because of Glennie herself — someone with a personal approach to hearing, and someone with a huge reputation as a percussion soloist in classical circles... — but also because it was released on a big classical label (Naxos), along with notes seeking to position it within contemporary classical developments. It doesn't seem the album made much of a splash in the classical community, where contemporary music of any sort remains an uphill battle..., but Glennie has now returned with another album alongside violist Szilárd Mezei — already part of the quartet on The Core-Tet Project — & his Polar Quartet (a more jazz-inspired group...): Capt's Look was recorded in Serbia in October 2022 (& just released on Warsaw's Sluchaj), and whereas The Core-Tet Project begins with the novel & aggressive texture of classical guitar & piano alongside pizzicato viola & percussion (eventually moving more into e.g. quasi-romantic viola & piano sonata textures...), Mezei's Polar Quartet includes another percussionist (Ivan Burka, mainly on vibes?), plus reed (Bogdan Rankovic, mostly on clarinet) & double bass (Ervin Malina). The result, at least from my perspective, is then a more open & flexible texture overall (i.e. without the chordal instrument, pace the vibes perhaps, & e.g. per Threadgill's classic Air...), allowing Glennie's orchestral feel more play over the course of its extended tapestry (plus a shorter "encore").... Of course, beyond being the most familiar name in this space from The Core-Tet Project, Mezei continues to release various albums, although more often lately with composed (or at least thematic) programs: I first encountered him with (the improvised) In Just around Martin Blume (first discussed here in January 2012...), but I'm nonetheless unfamiliar with this Polar Quartet. (I suppose it must be related to Mezei's septet recording from 2013, Polar released on Not Two, but the only other musician in common is Rankovic....) In any case, while The Core-Tet Project was intriguing, besides its frequent reliance on traditional chordal structures, it also came off as more a series of vignettes or studies. Capt's Look is much more unified in its sweep, although it does pass through distinctive stylistic domains (e.g. jungle to traffic or noir...), not unlike the sorts of travelogue or passing fusion articulations that've already been typical in this space.... There's certainly a sense of anticipation, even theatricality, to open, atmospheric senses being cultivated throughout (including a little jazzier now with horn & bass...), thinning or lingering for impact at times.... But this is still a process around Glennie (repeating from earlier post-jazz improv histories, perhaps...), and if anything, I'd say she could still be more assertive (although a sense of flow does develop at times here...), while Capt's Look seems to be another step in a general project that will (hopefully) continue....

Classical music continues to be a significant fount for collaborations in this space, particularly for string groups, including various projects around Ernesto Rodrigues. Those (more often arco) string articulations can involve a variety of novel pairings as well (including with non-strings...), but what I've taken to calling the "jazz string quartet" (with double bass instead of a second violin) seems to be becoming an ongoing format (for a variety of musicians...). And it's been specifically ongoing for Berlin-Lisbon quartet Dis/con/sent (Dietrich Petzold, Ernesto & Guilherme Rodrigues & Matthias Bauer), now releasing its fifth album on Creative Sources, München (recorded there live this past June): While the program presents two substantial four-movement "string quartets" (complete with opus number being the recording date...), indeed suggesting a classical format, the brief accompanying materials emphasize the live & unedited (& uncut) nature of the performance. There's also a sort of aggressiveness (or at least novelty...) built into the sound of Dis/con/sent — whose first album was reviewed here in October 2018 — via extended technique, with Petzold especially bringing "bowed metal" (& clavichord & tenor violin here) & sometimes vocalizations, but those qualities (despite some solos...) are also increasingly bound to the flow of the quartet as a whole. Technique becomes in service to an overall sense of abstraction (per the post-Bartók quartet world...), i.e. to a classical sense of scope & form. (So this differs from e.g. more "anthropological" productions involving zoomimesis, etc. Rather there's a focus on new, but coherent ensemble textures around four string instruments — with various other inspirations being more subsumed.) And so München does follow a line of development for this quartet, the "digital" release Kühlspot Social Club (noted here in a December 2018 discussion around Ljubljana, that album being from the trio here minus bass...) appearing on the heels of Dis/con/sent, with Ulrichsberg (as mentioned in another mini-survey of string quartets involving Rodrigues around Fantasy Eight in August 2021...) & Kompositionen (as noted briefly for its turn to graphic scores in a different October 2022 review...) both being recorded in 2021. The trio with Petzold & the two Rodrigueses hasn't recorded since Ljubljana (May 2018), but had already released Sacred Noise (a double album, recorded in 2016) & Der Sturm (digital, 2017) as well.... (And then the first mention of Petzold here was actually with the quartet album Crane Cries in April 2018 — with the conventional two violins, so unusual for this space — while the most recent specific mention was with yet another "jazz" string quartet, again with the same underlying trio, but with Jan Roder on bass, Get your own picture reviewed in January 2020.... And for Bauer, the most recent mention was with the "trombone trio" Der Dritte Stand in July 2022....) That's a lot to relate (while still only mentioning strings albums, until the last that is...). But München does show considerable development around this format, especially via its more abstract collective idiom, presenting two instant compositions that would sustain LP-length albums by themselves. (One might then press a contrast with Lisbon String Trio, another long-running Rodrigues group, but crucially featuring guests — as well as often more of a world vibe, pace jazz per se, largely excised from Dis/con/sent at this point....) The result then involves variations in intensities, some scuffling in some moments, but also soaring passages of extended four-way flow, including via novel combos of harmonics, pizzicato, etc. (Varieties of harmonics are particularly creative at times....) Dramatic to open, continuing to glimpse broad vistas, München thus reaches for symphonic senses of abstraction & "completeness," i.e. for the world of the post-Beethoven string quartet (far more than it does for classic jazz...). And while it also involves some slack, it does mostly arrive: Regarding the "instant" part, there's far more expressivity & flow here than e.g. a typical classical quartet trying to work through a novel, through-composed score....

DIY synth artist Jean-Marc Foussat seemed to be finding a new level for his own musical expression (beyond the considerable work he's done to illuminate others'...) heading into the pandemic, particularly with the trio Présent Manifeste (with Evan Parker & Daunik Lazro) from double album Cafe Oto Wed 22 Jan (2020), as reviewed here that same July. Since then he did also release e.g. another trio album with classic European improvisors (Carlos Zingaro & Urs Leimgruber), l'Aile d'Icare recorded back in 2019, (also) featuring some great (textural) moments.... There've been duo albums too, reaching out to relatively unknown musicians, including most of Foussat's latest quartet of releases (e.g. on his Bandcamp), i.e. those with Anne Foucher, Jean-Jacques Duerinckx & Guy-Frank Pellerin: While also yielding intriguing passages, Foucher's violin is already electrified, and Duerinckx's sax sounds pass through Foussat's processing, but Pellerin's saxes (on Les Beaux Jours, a very long album also with naturalistic implications...) are less mediated, usually involving a more separate-acoustic sound. And that's true as well for their trio album adding Eugenio Sanna (electric guitar & effects), Escale recorded in Italy in July 2023 (a few months after the duo...), where the trio interaction also seems to open up over the duo(s), further forging its own sense of space.... There're various allusions too, even some deconstructed rock guitar (per various senses of nostalgia perhaps...), but also a generally immersive & world-making atmosphere of various twists & turns. The outdoorsy (but still occasionally spacey! ... beyond being spatial) vibe of these albums also recalls a previous trio with Pellerin & Sanna, Water Reflections on FMR (with violinist Matthias Boss, recorded in 2019) as reviewed here in July 2021: Foussat with his elaborate electronic (& vocal...) setup provides a wide range of provocations & responses within a similar (environmental, indeed sometimes watery...) frame on Escale. And despite the pastoral evocations, there's a gritty intensity developing at times as well (including via a sort of three-way pointillism...).

I'm returning to share some thoughts here after what seems like a longer than usual year-end interval (during which I've also had more than the usual personal business, ongoing...), centered on Italian trombonist Carlo Mascolo, who first appeared in this space on Intonarumori with Lisbon String Trio (reviewed in an extended series back in August 2017...), then most recently with the quartet (with voice) "4!" & its album Factorial (also on Creative Sources, reviewed in October 2018), i.e. within a relatively narrow time interval a few years back. And that timeframe does seem to have been particularly significant for Mascolo, since the (trio) albums he subsequently released on FMR in '21 (Cinestesia with João Madeira & Felice Furioso, the latter also drummer for 4!) & '22 (Bridge In The Dark with MMM trio, Miguel Mira & Marcello Magliocchi) were also recorded in '17 & '18 respectively. So that may be the era as well for his most recent (continuing on FMR...) release Vuoto Bersagli, noted only (also) as recorded in Monopoli.... Vuoto Bersagli is then a rather short album (i.e. under half an hour), but more "out there" than the previous (also relatively preliminary...) "trombone trio" formats (thus becoming relatively concentrated...), including two musicians with whom I was otherwise mostly unfamiliar, Giacomo Mongelli (drums, objects) & Pino Montecalvo (trombone, toy junk). Mascolo is also credited specifically with "no-input trombone," and I don't know what that means exactly... he's used various preparations (e.g. tubes) in the past. (Maybe it relates to the "empty" of the title?) There're apparently some electronics involved here too though, seemingly beyond "toys." (I hadn't noticed previously, but it turns out that all these albums are also available on Bandcamp from Altamura's Muzic Plus association.... Otherwise, FMR seems to be one of the few physical-only labels left in this space!) In any case, sound is often rather transformed, but there's an atmosphere of ritual austerity projected (by many of the eight short tracks...) too, almost even a folksy quality at times. Yet this is also (usually) quite extended technique, perhaps evocative — in a couple of directions — of e.g. Sawt Out (with its two percussionists & trumpet lineup), most recently reviewed here with Black Current (this past July), or else duo Beam Splitter & their most recent release Split Jaw (reviewed in March). Of course the latter (also) features voice (along with trombone), and there ends up being a surprising amount of vocalizing (including in chorus) on Vuoto Bersagli too. (Accordingly, its mood can shift between raucous activity & austerity.) There's also a specific method cited (for Vuoto Bersagli, but already e.g. for Bridge In The Dark...), "Blind Instant Composition" where "all musicians play together but no one can see each other." So is this a new outing, or are we taken back (yet again) to the pre-pandemic days? I can't really tell, but the result is a distinctive articulation of "extended trombone" — a trio sometimes sounding as one composite (or complementary) instrument, while evolving various novel (collective) textures, finally into (timbrally modified, seeming reedy somehow...) calls.

Andrea Centazzo (b.1948; percussionist from Italy, living in Southern California for thirty years...) has deep roots in European improvisation, but I hadn't actually featured him: I was surprised to see now that there's only been a single mention, tangentially in December 2022 in my initial discussion around vibraphonist Sergio Armaroli. But Centazzo has revived his Ictus Records label (again), and continues to produce albums — including recently Indian Summer with Armaroli, featuring compositions & a relatively larger ensemble.... And now there's also The Panda Session, recorded in Berlin just this past November, involving not only Harri Sjöström & Giancarlo Schiaffini — pace the recent review of their fine More Duos And Trios with Armaroli (also in November)... — but Achim Kaufmann as well. Of course, the pianist participates regularly with Sjöström — who organized this quartet — in both Move & Sestetto Internazionale (e.g. per the September review of the latter's recent Due Mutabili...), but appears new to working with Centazzo (who's also credited on electronics here, as well as e.g. uses uncredited squeak toys...). The others have already made a variety of albums with Centazzo though, including both participating on Orbits (i.e. the earlier mention...), while Schiaffini was already e.g. with Armaroli & Centazzo on Trigonos (a more tonal & atmospheric trio album from 2018 on Armaroli's Dodicilune series, as mentioned previously...), as well as appearing on various other albums with Centazzo, while Sjöström also appeared with Centazzo on e.g. Steps (again with Armaroli) & Lost Idols (with bassist Matthias Bauer). But with Kaufmann there's another level of intricacy, the piano sometimes more apparent (i.e. pianistic), but sometimes functioning almost as a second extended percussionist, i.e. as part of a sort of double horn & percussion setup. In fact the seven tracks involve a wide variety of techniques & sonorities, beginning from a metallic clatter (immediately asserting Centazzo's participation...), restarting at track breaks e.g. to encompass jazzier passages (even hints of rock...), often on the raucous side, but also into rubbed strings & volumetric resonances.... Although it doesn't seem especially new then (pace these musicians' other recent work...), The Panda Session does involve a high level of detail & attention, e.g. every idea (often) subtly commented upon & animated by Centazzo, different tracks visiting different worlds (pace the general agitation of jazz...) in turn, building an overall sense of labyrinthine gravity that I'm eventually sorry has to end....

Double bassist João Madeira continues to be one of the most prolific of a new generation of Portuguese string improvisors, now releasing more albums apart from Ernesto Rodrigues: I'd reviewed the trio Open in Finder in November, for instance, from his relatively new 4Da Record imprint, and now note that Madeira seems to be undertaking a series of overlapping projects as well with legendary violinist Carlos Zíngaro: First to appear was actually the self-titled N'Bandi — recorded in Lisbon this past July — an "EP" said to be heralding a more substantial release from the trio of Madeira, Zíngaro & guitarist Guillaume Gargaud. (And I hadn't mentioned Gargaud here to this point, but he has e.g. a duo album with Lauri Hyvärinen, Jupiter in Pisces released late last year on Plus Timbre... plus appearing e.g. with Rodrigues on 2017 release Sound Bridge....) That album involves a more lyrical, folksy quality at times, i.e. is less densely articulated than many Madeira outings, but involving guitar (alongside classical strings...) also seems to be a recent focus: "The Wall" — another named band, a quartet — recorded Na Parede live in March 2023, including guitarist Florian Stoffner (who wrote the brief intro for the release...) alongside Madeira & Zíngaro & cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. And March 2023 was a busy time for these musicians, with Altered Egos (reviewed here in June...) — already featuring Stoffner alongside Madeira, with Rodrigues (& Bruno Parrinha) — and The Giving Tree moving on (a quite long album with much string fluttering...) — with Flak on guitar together with Rodrigues, Madeira, Lonberg-Holm (& percussionist José Oliveira) both recorded only a few days later. Of course Lonberg-Holm (b.1962) has appeared regularly in this context, including most recently (alongside Rodrigues again, plus e.g. piano...) on Uncommon Statement (recorded subsequently in October), while Stoffner (b.1975) has become increasingly prominent of late: E.g. his short duo album with Albert Cirera, Mow (at least their second, following I'm a resonant Aircraft, on Creative Sources from 2018...), just appeared on Agustí Fernández's Sirulita label, enacting a sophisticated timbral fusion.... And to dive back into my notes further, Madeira himself was actually first mentioned here in a September 2015 review of Cloud Voices, a quartet album around Rodrigues involving "exploration of nonlinear process...." (His next release with Rodrigues was Cosmos in 2022, soon Chaos & then Dérive.... And Madeira has already returned with Rodrigues & Parrinha for the trio album Into the Wood, recorded in May 2023, a more searching outing, with three separate tracks built on waves or continuities: This seems to have become something of a core trio for Rodrigues lately, but this is also their first album as a trio only....) Anyway, presumably it's Lonberg-Holm's participation that led to the release of Na Parede by Chicago's Catalytic Sound — but for subscribers only I'm told, although I was provided a copy.... (So maybe I shouldn't really be featuring Na Parede here, if others can't hear it!?) As opposed to the generally more open textures noted already then, The Wall can sometimes seem to approach its name when it comes to density, occasionally even with frenetic activity, i.e. seemingly a chase by the end.... But there's still a sort of balance & underlying folksiness (including various lighter passages...), yielding a kind of classic feel: There're a few overt evocations of (human) drama, but the wild(er)ness of the performance seems more often to reflect an indeterminate naturalistic setting (& Altered Egos had projected something of a jungle vibe at times too, tending there more toward post-industrial or even punk...), a transformed/transformative setting of calls... not actually "horn calls" here, even as that can be the impression (pace also e.g. various pizzicato passages...): Overlapping textures of calls, sometimes howling expression, twisting notes & bent strings, egalitarian in its collective expression.... (Among Lonberg-Holm outings, perhaps the album Tales From, albeit there with horns, is the clearest comparison in terms of these sorts of overlapping, assertive, egalitarian calls.... That's also a first meeting for a quartet, and generally a louder & more aggressive album.) So perhaps there's no specific sense of e.g. "indoor" or "outdoor" remaining on Na Parede either (beyond call-as-landscape inversion...), but rather a sense of creating its own new context (& setting, i.e. landscape-as-calls...) in the moment, adding up to a sort of posthuman (naturalistic) articulation, i.e. a strong new form of (collective, string) life... abstracted from any particular sense of place. (Life is itself a nonlinear — & nonequilibrium — process, one might always go on to observe....)

Next I want to relate some thoughts on a quite lengthy recorded session from Lille (France) by a working trio of musicians with whom I was basically unfamiliar: Ø — which I read as the empty set — was recorded in May 2023 & features Andrea Bazzicalupo (guitar & preparations), Jonas Engel (reeds & modified p-trumpet) & Asger Thomsen (double bass & objects). And per the intro for the trio on Bazzicalupo's site, "everyone has cultivated original approaches to their instruments and strives for a transcendent music that is at once abstract and precise." In other words, their instruments often sound deconstructed, re-blended into novel & intriguing timbres: Many of the quasi-minimalistic textures that emerge are appealing, if sometimes tending toward the repetitive side, but there also end up being some genre associations later, e.g. around rock guitar.... And despite the general recombination of timbres, the two string players cultivate rather distinct sound worlds at times too, with the horn often in the background — e.g. highlighting particular resonances, rather than standing out front per the norms of the "horn trio" format... — & various percussive expressions across the texture, i.e. without an explicit percussionist. (So one might compare e.g. Georg Wissel & e.g. the recent Flight Rvw2349, reviewed here in September, but that outing does end up broaching more the "sax trio" per se at times within its broad, single arc....) Some of the material can sound like static or even vocalizing, and the interactions can be quite lively at times.... And I'd actually heard both Thomsen — with the Mia Dyberg Trio (with albums on Clean Feed, Dyberg having appeared herself in this space on the short Creative Sources album Egin, noted in October 2018 with its original title Efterår...) — and Bazzicalupo — who put out a solo last year on Quebecois label Tour de Bras — but not Engel. (The latter's orientation toward textural playing seems part of a broad trend, e.g. Bruno Parrinha... stretching back e.g. to Urs Leimgruber....) Michael Vorfeld's presence on Flight Rvw2349 also already suggested one of the clearest references here for some textures aligned to those on Ø, i.e. old favorite Nashaz (with Michael Thieke handling the reed-resonance part...) & its resonant, quasi-"nautical" feel. Then there's the string-focused Traintracks Roadsides Wastelands Debris, nearly sharing a track title as well.... Ø has more though, and might even be undone a bit (in terms of overall impact) by its daunting length, although there're already some great timbral fusions being explored & articulated (sometimes almost ritualistically...) by the trio — which goes by the name "Ø" as well. (And this is another release from Shrike Records, an increasingly worthwhile & eclectic small label, their The House On The Hill having just been reviewed here in November....)

It finally happened: Jack Wright released an album with his "full" (Philadelphia based) quartet: It's called RAWL — recorded live in Montréal in June 2023 — with the quartet being called RAWL as well. And as it happens, I'd only just reviewed Yaw by the Wrest trio (i.e. three quarters of Rawl) here in December. So I've already shared some recent thoughts, including on this (at the time, still merely implied...) quartet. Rawl was released on Ben Bennett's site, but without a physical release this time (which Yaw — recorded in 2022 — did have, albeit minimally). So it's probably wrong to read too much into that, but although the album is self-titled, the single track is called Waiting for Good, which could suggest any number of things, not least the relative dearth of "good" in our world today.... Besides being self-titled, Rawl also seems a bit self-conscious: There's a quick vocalization to open, some abrupt (coordinated?) noise initiating the interaction, and then generally a tautly controlled (temporal) tapestry maintaining a flexible sense of inter-dimensionality or common "surface" among the musicians. So that contrasts with Wright's more angular recent trio outings with Never (i.e. on Not Nothing, with a lot of forward momentum...) & Wrest. And so although the resulting ebb & flow doesn't engage me in quite the same way, Rawl can actually seem more egalitarian across the quartet, evoking more thoughts of symmetry & restraint. (There're still some shriller passages, e.g. some passages in high tones, but generally fewer eruptions. It's more of a controlled exposition of material, almost taking turns.) This actually seems to be something of a pattern for Wright then, as I'm only now observing: The Unrepeatable Quartet (from Calgary, 2012) is from a previous generation, even employing a "classic free jazz quartet" format, but shows a similar sort of balance & restraint (e.g. of waiting for a response...). Perhaps that's in part about developing a style, and Wright's collective interactions do become more intricate over time (including e.g. his recent interactions with himself on What is What, recorded between Yaw & Rawl...), but that's true of the "shadow" Wright trio as well, i.e. Virtual Balboa (Bennett, Darrup & Lipson — but not Wright) whose short album Petrichor (recorded in 2019, eventually released on Creative Sources & reviewed here in November 2021) also adds a horn player (the otherwise unknown Greg Kelley on trumpet) so as to forge a similarly egalitarian & pensive quartet tapestry, eventually fading away.... (One might simply observe that the trios around Wright have been jazzier, i.e. rather than using a term like "angular," but the latter does correspond to a sense of transverse movement, rather than maintaining collective flow within existing dimensions....) So why does a quartet, in particular, elicit this sort of shift? Various slow & bent tones & static come & go in quasi-symphonic fashion... with Rawl incorporating a mix of naturalistic & post-industrial evocations as well into a sort of (somewhat muted, i.e. dynamically flat...) howling-machinic hybrid.... (And the resulting sense of shared surface & coordination does suggest some of the other timbre-tapestry music I've been discussing regularly here of late, e.g. around Sergio Armaroli....) There also seems to be some "weight" felt by the quartet members to create this "obvious" release, i.e. from the seemingly heightened opening moment, soon yielding to what seems an almost excessive sense of egalitarian care.... (The pressure to release a quartet album seems to result in an almost ritualistic interaction — i.e. more so than affective, active expression involving the listener.... Perhaps it's as simple as the additional relations implied in a quartet — over a trio — adding constraints, specifically constraints per se here because of an underlying desire for symmetry....) So I can't say that the outcome packs the same (affective) punch as some of Wright's releases, but it's ambitious & intriguing: A generalized flow sort of carries the musicians along at times it seems, as if they're already embedded & in process, more so than offering oppositional or even reflective (rhythmically surpassing...) responses, albeit with more personal expression simmering to the fore in some moments.... So Rawl indeed seems to offer a capacious foundation, and I'm ready to hear more from Rawl.

Continuing with another ongoing collaboration, I've already had occasion to mention El Pricto's Discordian Records a few times, but not Pricto (born Andrés Rojas, Venezuela, 1977) himself. And apparently he's been performing with both saxophonist Don Malfon (introduced here with Mutations, also with Agustí Fernández...) & percussionist Vasco Trilla for more than twenty years, but Behenii - Part I — recorded in Barcelona in September 2023 — is their first trio album together. Of course, Trilla has been something of a fixture here, e.g. mentioned recently alongside Ra Kalam Bob Moses on Singing Icons (with the two even more recently being joined by Pedro Melo Alves as well for Sonic Alchemy Suprema...), but originally with the trio album Tidal Heating (reviewed here in February 2017) on Poland's Not Two — & more recently e.g. with the double horn trio Implositions (reviewed June 2021). The latter explores a smoother, post-Cage sound world, while the former touches the post-rock world (with two different guitars...), and those worlds likewise seem to inspire the alternating tracks of Behenii, described as a "bipolar mixture." The album — & I believe Part II will be a direct continuation — thus begins abruptly & loudly, almost "too much" in its densely intricate exchanges, but then moves into more shifting held resonances etc. for later tracks. (The former style can even recall the previous entry & Rawl sometimes, before turning more laminar elsewhere....) In any case, El Pricto has been prolific — including a recent solo on synth, Moonburnt released in November... — originally playing reeds, but now (after a health-related shift...) developing his own style on modular synthesizer. (And the title reference here is to the 15 "Behenian fixed stars," presumably coming to 15 tracks as well with the second volume.... So although the intro mentions sci-fi, the inspiration is apparently more from astrology & the occult.) The results then involve a variety of creative textures (generally post-industrial, with increasingly little "genre" implicated...), the implications "between" the two poles, i.e. their potential convergence, perhaps becoming the most tantalizing.... Behenii can be aggressive at times, ritualistic too, but also retains an affective intimacy that draws the listener into its uniquely evolving (alternating) sound world(s). I start to hear the "American" quality too — & it does seem that Pricto is ready to roll with his new instrument....

[ I've decided to go ahead & add Behenii to "favorites," anticipating adding a Behenii - Part II there as well at some point. My current intent is to articulate some further thoughts then. - 03/27/24 ]

Coming back again to Shrike Records, I want to make a few belated remarks on the quartet album Chord, recorded in London in June 2022 & released last year (also in June), featuring a trio of guitarists around legendary drummer & percussionist Eddie Prévost: N.O. Moore, James O'Sullivan & Ross Lambert. Moore has become a fixture alongside Prévost (e.g. appearing together for the trio album Traktor, also from Shrike, reviewed here June 2022 — thus making me reluctant to put more attention toward Chord so soon afterward, I guess...), while I'd heard O'Sullivan mainly with Thanos Chrysakis (noted from a March 2015 entry...), but not really Lambert (aside from larger settings). However as it happens, Lambert was the one to lead the third week's concert for Prévost's 80th birthday celebration the following month (July 2022) at Cafe Oto, due to covid-related absences of Prévost & Moore — as released in the "workshop" volume entitled Widdershins. And so let me turn to a little survey of that substantial four-volume release (these items having been reviewed extensively already by others...), beginning with a "jazz" version of Prévost (the drummer) on A Company of Others, a concert that was meant to include eight saxes (actually coming to six...) alongside a distinguished four-member back line. (I might actually enjoy this most old-fashioned, opening outing with its relatively extroverted sax choir the most....) And then there's The Art of Noticing with Prévost the percussionist — as he's credited on Chord — including e.g. John Butcher (& nearly reprising their lineup from Sounds of Assembly, released by Meenna in 2021...), whose subsequent duo recording with Prévost, Unearthed (recorded June 2023, there with Prévost the drummer...) seems to be initiating a new series (also on Matchless) called High Laver Levitations.... Then Last Calls, announced as the final performance of AMM (here a duo between Prévost & Rowe, with Tilbury contributing a solo later from his home...), concludes the set (listed some places as A Bright Nowhere, released as physical CDs late last year...), and indeed returns something of a focus to the electric guitar interaction & so the triple guitar lineup on Chord, i.e. as recorded the month prior. (There's also an older reference for such a guitar trio for me, Halster: Their album Mindfulness, reviewed here in July 2016, sounds rather different, yet similar too in its string resonance interpenetrations....) And I didn't end up writing anything at the time, as it took a while for the textures & interactions on Chord to open up for me (beyond hearing various references...), but it does seem to be almost a multi-dimensional (& simultaneous) version of Prévost's duo with Keith Rowe.... And maybe Chord is at its best when a sort of "new age" beauty rings through, but there's more of a textural bounty (especially of carefully modulated overtone spectra...) — including stark differences of ensemble articulation between the various tracks — than I originally noticed: In some moments, it can almost seem to take on a life of its own, recontextualizing itself on the move, haunting & shimmering, metastable....

Moving to Asia, some remarks on the recent self-titled album by international quartet Snow Moon: Hsiao-Feng Lin (bamboo flute), Yong Yandsen (saxophone), Darren Moore (percussion) & Shih-Yang Lee (piano) recorded Snow Moon in Taipei last March, as released on LaoBan Records, the latter founded by Moore (from Australia) & Yandsen (Malaysia) — who've released many albums together (& with various others, e.g. recently with Akira Sakata...), mostly in an aggressive & rhythmic "free jazz" style. The Taiwanese additions here were new to me though, with Lin's bamboo flute making a particular impression — not only when fronting, but in articulating background resonances, percussive pops, etc. And Lee's piano is often coloristic, sometimes transformed (as from the noisily resonant opening...), or accenting chords (recalling e.g. Japanese improvising pianists...), but sometimes more straight/Western. And both the more dense moments, with horns standing out over wild textures (as Moore is an inventive, coloristic percussionist as well...), and the more reflective moments can be appealing here, the latter sometimes featuring airy combinations & bent strings. Some of that does evoke traditional Chinese music, and the release notes claim the musicians "effortlessly merge" East & West — as well as deliver "a unique sonic experience, inviting listeners to explore a realm of otherworldly soundscapes." The latter involve sections evoking more of the jazz tradition, as well as more contemporary soundscapes (recalling, perhaps, e.g. Braxton, Armaroli... sometimes shimmering), with a characteristic & creative example occurring midway through the fifth & final track, the horns overlapping, various squeaks & croaks in texture, piano accents... seeming to come almost from the mountains of Southeast Asia for a moment, but soon driving more toward free jazz to close.... And I'm guessing that the ensemble textures on Snow Moon do depend upon individual microphone placement, e.g. for the bamboo flute (dizi, I assume...)? A fine sense of balance maintains across stylistic shifts, with good clarity, especially in slower or more open passages....

Infrequent Seams is then another smaller label to which I seem to return regularly (& do note that it's also on at least some of the streaming services...): Five Apparitions is the third album on the label from transducer-focused extended pianist (& rubbed metals performer...) Matthew Goodheart, and the second with his Broken Ghost Consort, following Presences (released in 2021 & featuring additional brass performers, plus a first track that's mainly speech...). The latter apparently instantiated his scheme of attaching transducers to piano & metal, as well as speakers to other instruments (to get them vibrating too...), but also seems relatively more preliminary & monolithic than Five Apparitions, which projects more dimensionality, including in its senses of acoustic space. Both feature Georg Wissel (clarinet) & George Cremaschi (bass): Wissel has suddenly become a feature here, as I find I keep referencing the (relatively obscure) trio album Flight Rvw2349 (recorded in 2023...) lately, and it does indeed present an overlapping timbral dynamic with the trio interactions on Five Apparitions, although there as a single arc.... And I hadn't mentioned Cremaschi, but he's appeared e.g. on Another Timbre (from 2016), with bass (both plucked & bowed...) being an important aspect of the textures here, while Goodheart's first release on Infrequent Seams was actually a solo for transduced metal, Berlin Head Metal from 2019.... This is composed music then, by Goodheart, who seems to feature discussions of transduced music extensively in his academic writings, and involves both improvisation & performer choice. So some of the result might be compared e.g. with the recent set Blòc (reviewed here in April 2023) from Pascal Niggenkemper (also with a Cologne connection, pace Scott Fields' "modular" works as well...), e.g. the "autonomous" bass duo La vallée de l'étrange or the mechanically induced low strings quartet Beat the odds (but probably even more so the earlier "feedback cello" quartet on Leo, EFZ, from different musicians but already noted there as well...). In all cases, there's a sense of haunting, here characterized as "reembodied sound." (The intro to Five Apparitions mentions four movements, so the fifth was apparently added later — live from Wuppertal: The first four are from Köln, and the whole production has a vague 2023 date, but doesn't explicitly state when it was recorded.) Textures for Five Apparitions are then generally airy, with a strong sense of space overall, probably most characteristic in their smooth & rubbed tones, shifting combo waves, but also more pianistic (& jazzy, moody...) for the third track, while the (extra?) fifth track involves some vocalization again (but reworked, so not like the beginning of Presences...). The result is then not only hybrid electronic-acoustic (with the transducers...), but hybrid timbres between the instruments (as noted e.g. of other recent Wissel releases...), a sort of sound installation (& credited as such) as well. The sort of "braided" ensemble timbres almost recall Xenakis for me, although Five Apparitions is not nearly as aggressive, perhaps more akin to extended pianist Magda Mayas with Great Waitress & e.g. Flock, its sense of ritual & smoothness around-through piano.... But Goodheart (from San Francisco, teaching in Upstate New York...) is rarely very pianistic for long. There's more sense of interplay & simultaneity here than previous releases too, shifting textures & shimmering resonances (indeed not so unlike the vibe of Braxton's DCWM again...) — with a sense that more is happening beneath the surface, although endings are generally muted (& more preliminary overall in terms of affective impact...). Broken Ghost Consort does also intend a brief tour of Central Europe next month to celebrate the release of Five Apparitions.

There's so much more music being released in this general arena these days than even a handful of years ago, not only more by musicians who've drawn my attention already, but more of the sorts of combos (of both old & new participants...) that I'd been seeking: Albums seem to appear regularly lately that address musical "thoughts" that I'd been eager to address previously, but end up neglecting now, forced to choose, always trying to include unfamiliar names too.... (In the past, there were also more albums appearing here that I didn't really hear as all that successful in sum, but nonetheless wanted to highlight for some aspect....) It's been a welcome explosion of activity, and rewarding too to have been a small part of the conversation, to hear some anticipated (& unanticipated) music become real.... And then of course there're individual musicians today who're able to release quite regularly & prolifically (i.e. as part of a new musical economy, for better or worse...): I most recently reviewed German "architectural" multi-horn player Udo Schindler in June 2023, mentioning his Bandcamp trio album Canto Senza Parole Recitativo (with Eric Zwang Eriksson & Sebi Tramontana), and Schindler does continue to self-release there, most recently Dense Bushes with Delicate Chirps (recorded in Munich in September 2023). For that outing, Schindler was joined by Irene Kepl — with whom he recorded the duo album Fabulierblattchen in 2019, released on Creative Sources... — on violin, and Karina Erhard — with whom he recorded the trio album (with Damon Smith) The Munich Sound Studies Vol. 1 for FMR, reviewed here January 2021 — on flute. (Coincidentally, Kepl also appeared on Resonators with George Cremaschi, alluded in the prior entry.... And Schindler had already released other material with both Kepl & Erhard, but not together.) And as the title might imply — & regular readers might note that I sometimes use the word "thicket" here myself... — there's considerably more simultaneity than many Schindler releases, which tend to be more open & sinewy in their melodic explorations. (The latter could be said of at least the first self-released track on the pending trio album with Eriksson & Ardhi Engl, Sound Poems to the Risk, recorded the week after Dense Bushes with Delicate Chirps & set to appear on Creative Sources....) So here we have a denser interaction, but also as the title suggests, a melodic (generative) sense, a sort of (polyphonic) shifting of perspective between undergrowth & fluttering to the fore.... There's thus a "bigger" sound much of the time, i.e. more chordal explorations of sonic spectra, but also collectively slowing at times, lingering in vertical layers. By the end, overlapping lines come to enter & leave at various oblique angles, suggesting almost a sense of wistfulness. And I do find myself wishing that the music continued (pace many of Schindler's albums being on the long side...) with its naturalistic atmosphere & sometimes dense (yet always in motion... a living thicket...) soundscape.

I'd added some thoughts in November here about a newly documented collaboration between Ernesto Rodrigues, incredibly prolific as well, and flautist Carlos Bechegas: Secrets Under Trees (also with Guilherme Rodrigues), recorded last June, was noted in the longer review of Bechegas for (another trio album with string players in Portugal) Open in Finder. And the two have promptly returned — after what had earlier been a long absence from recording for Bechegas... — with Echoing the Chorus of Life (recorded in Lisbon in January, so the first 2024 recording that I'm noting here...), alongside Carlos Santos on electronics. The latter has been a frequent collaborator for Rodrigues — first mentioned here with Surfaces in September 2015 (paralleling the first mention of João Madeira, as it happens...), an album including Nuno Torres on alto sax as well, the latter joining Rodrigues & Santos for another new trio album, Impulses and Signals (recorded in 2023, but) unusually delayed in its release.... Anyway, given the particular participation of Santos, whose tendency in these collaborations is to stay in the background, quiet electronics delicately twisting overtone spectra, against which the more assertive players articulate, the one-movement outing suggests almost the intimacy of a duo.... (The approach might thus be compared e.g. to Anthony Braxton & his SuperCollider electronics, i.e. with a musician on either side of the "curtain," but per a more linear arrangement there, pace the twisting & folding tapestries of Rodrigues et al. It's also been unclear what tech Santos actually uses.) In that sense, Echoing the Chorus of Life can also be heard as something of a development of Stratus, a septet album also (subtly) featuring Santos — & first reviewed here in January 2019 — alongside a range of colorfully fusing & airy wind & string timbres. Echoing the Chorus of Life is then a more pared down or focused interaction, a single arc that takes in considerable territory from insects & birds to both underwater & airy (or even outer...) spaciousness (all generally being naturalistic evocations, of course...), developing particularly well-fused & distinctive timbral combos between flute & viola — as inflected by Santos throughout, who does also come to the fore at times. A delicate (even windswept...) sense of wave motion is then often in play (pace various Rodrigues examples...). And the focus does lead to some thinner sections, but the arc of the single track's momentum is also continually recontextualizing each successive tone & (micro)interval. Intensity can thus seem low in some (immediate) moments, substituted for a generalized sense of suspension, i.e. underlying feelings of scope & mystery. (Santos is becoming more sophisticated in his musical contributions, but I can't say that I enjoy his graphics as much here, red frame with white script lettering....) So Echoing the Chorus of Life does present a welcome development & concentration of prior results, while also seeming to herald yet more from Bechegas....

And I've generally avoided making administrative only posts here — even as I've sprinkled various remarks... — but I'm currently in the process of moving my home, after decades. It doesn't involve going very far geographically, but after raising three children in the current apartment, tremendous wear & tear here etc., not to mention all the emotions, the move feels like a big deal for me. It's actually been going on for five months now, between the time of deciding to make a move, finding a new place, getting some physical changes made (starting over the holidays...) to accommodate us, and now planning the actual move.... Plus I'm downsizing & getting rid of a lot of old stuff, so it's a major housecleaning still underway.... (I'm hoping this confers mental benefits once I feel less overwhelmed by the ongoing physical project.... I'm also still trying to find a home for various surplus CDs, if there're ideas....) So anyway, hopefully I'll be done with all this soon, get myself feeling settled at the new place, and get back to some more in depth writing: I've been trying to keep up with thoughts here, but I've been distracted, and don't think my articulations have been very good lately — not striving enough, I guess I'd say. However, hopefully I've managed to note the recordings I've wanted to note during this period, even as my discussions have been less exciting.... (I haven't been especially busy with the moving operations, only distracted, so listening to music itself has seemed productive....) And then finally, I wanted to note specifically that of course I'll have a new address: I keep the address up to date on the main Support Us page on the site. (I should probably update that page more generally too for the 2020s, but that part may have to wait....) As I'm typing this, it still says Mountain View, but when it changes to Sunnyvale, that means I'm at the new place. (I'm actually moving in a week, so may also have only limited ability to respond for a while.) For anyone who sends me physical materials, please update your records accordingly. Email isn't changing. Thank you!

Getting back to my usual daily activities here, although I still have various post-move chores pending, I do want to go ahead & note some thoughts (together in one entry) concerning a couple of new Creative Sources releases: The two programs aren't very related, although cellist Guilherme Rodrigues performs on both: He's continuing to branch out & record in different combos (including without Ernesto), and so I want to note first the intriguing electroacoustic textural explorations of (the generically titled) Fields, recorded in Berlin back in March 2022. For that outing, which can be a little thin or searching in some moments, Rodrigues is joined by a recent fixture in this space, Harri Sjöström — partly as a followup to the duo album the two recorded in 2018, The Treasures Are — as well as by Lawrence Casserley & Floros Floridis to forge a quartet. It turns out that I hadn't mentioned Floridis (here on clarinets) before, but Casserley first appeared in this space with the Valid Tractors trio (with Pat Thomas & Dominic Lash) & On the Validity of Tractors (reviewed February 2019), and then most recently with Resonant Voyaging (with Viv Corringham & Martin Hackett, reviewed August 2022): His personal development of a "signal processing instrument" has made him into a unique contributor. And then the textures on Fields are indeed reminiscent of other recent Sjöström outings, e.g. with Sergio Armaroli, and given the two-horn lineup here, especially their quartet outing with Giancarlo Schiaffini & Veli Kujala (as reviewed December 2022). And obviously I'm finding these explorations around Sjöström lately to be quite fertile.... With Fields, there're also the explicit electronic manipulations of Casserley, but some similar outcomes, most appealing perhaps when they project a kind of sparkling, twittering jungle vibe... but also leading into layered feels, shearing or bending... an abstract (sometimes metallic...) spaciness. (The twisting, spectral vibe can also evoke e.g. Dense Bushes with Delicate Chirps from Udo Schindler, as reviewed here last month, but there again acoustic & less spacey per se....) There's thus a naturalism, but also a sense of fracture — projecting an underlying sort of mystery or spectrality. And Casserley does continue to be underrecorded.

So also with a meandering quality, but more around a feel for narrative, A tale unfolds (recorded in Lisbon last December) reprises the acoustic quintet formation from Dérive (first reviewed here last March...), adding three musicians in clarinetists Noel Taylor & Ziv Taubenfeld, as well as Guilherme Carmelo (on baritone electric guitar). The latter was new to me, not often distinctly audible here (but perhaps appearing in parallel with the guitar from Ernesto Rodrigues' textural septet milestone Stratus, reviewed January 2019...). However, the reed players join Bruno Parrinha (also on clarinet) to balance more against the strings (the two Rodrigueses & bassist João Madeira...) — with percussionist Monsieur Trinité appearing again as well, & without an intervening release in his case (& so perhaps marking this formation especially as a continuation of that from Dérive, as the others are already frequent collaborators...). So Dérive also suggested more of an "étude" format, with a series of rather specific tracks, whereas A tale unfolds proceeds in more arbitrary directions & with less tension, i.e. as a large group conversation.... There can thus be less focus at times, also a "smoothing" overall due to the added players, less clarity as to who's doing what, yet a mellow sense of movement & working through. A tale unfolds can almost sound casual, making for a subtly dynamic background for some of the various (unusual for me, with various vendors, etc.) goings on over my past few days: There's little in the way of confrontation, for instance... more suppleness. (And like Dérive, the mix & master is from Madeira.) Perhaps the biggest impression is then the narrative coherence of this octet, despite its various musical tangents in performance. It's the stronger album of the two here, in that sense. And will there be another followup, whether by the core quintet or along with others? A tale unfolds does seem to be another step on the way... to somewhere.

John Butcher is another experienced improviser who continues to be very prolific, performing with a wide variety of musicians & releasing on a wide variety of labels, including various albums that I've continued to review here. I also associate his music with geometric-acoustic elements (which I guess I've been assimilating lately to "spectral..."), particularly in smaller (technical) groupings, such that the 14-person 2021 performance for Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, released back in February as Fluid Fixations, seems to be something of a departure or development: I didn't actually notice the album originally, so I'm not delaying thoughts here for any other reason, but it was put out by Butcher himself, on his Weight of Wax imprint — the first activity there since The Apophonics on Air (a trio album, also with bassist John Edwards, reviewed here in November 2013...). Fluid Fixations is also composed, commissioned music: At least per the former, Butcher had performed Skullmarks with Common Objects (recorded in 2016, but released later & reviewed here in February 2019), compositions also based (as they partly are here...) on visual imagery. That album, consisting of a sextet with Butcher, also seems relatively soloistic at times (& involves troubling associations with the British Museum...), a series of scenes or vignettes, processual as well per the norms of Common Objects & their involvement of musicians on electronics. That sort of involvement is similar for Fluid Fixations, scaled up like everything else, but there's much less consistent orientation on particular formations or even foregrounds: There're some more soloistic passages — particularly striking e.g. for pinched-throat vocals & musical saw... — but coming from anywhere in the ensemble, i.e. generally twisting its perspectives from & through multiple dimensions in turn. It's also worth adding further thoughts on the other musicians involved, particularly since (per Evan Parker, to whom I'll return in a moment...) selecting the musicians is a central part of "composition" in a largely improvised setting.... In fact, Angharad Davies (violin) & Pat Thomas (electronics) return from Skullmarks, with the latter appearing often enough with Butcher in other, more traditionally jazzy settings — i.e. similar to Edwards (already noted above) or to percussionist (at least here) or drummer, Mark Sanders or Ståle Liavik Solberg respectively, who've appeared e.g. with Butcher on trio albums Last Dream of the Morning (reviewed here August 2017) & Fictional Souvenirs (May 2019). Also involved are Liz Allbee (trumpet) & Sophie Agnel (piano), both of whom appeared in the series of Ni Vu Ni Connu LP releases from the "John Butcher Festival" at Ausland Berlin, November 2019 (as also reviewed here, in series, in February 2022...): The "turntables" sense of electronics that sometimes animates Fluid Fixations can specifically recall Lamenti dall'infinito (with Allbee) from that series, but for the current ensemble, it's Dieb13 (instead) on turntables. (And in relations further afield, e.g. Allbee appeared in Christian Kobi's In Situ sextet on Same Place as well, another larger ensemble album, reviewed here December 2022 — with Kobi having already appeared with Butcher for the striking soprano sax quartet Cold Duck, reviewed January 2016....) And then there's leading German trombonist Matthias Müller (frequently noted in this space as well) as part of the "+13" here too, Müller having invited Butcher for his big Superimpose With set (as reviewed here June 2021...)..., plus also Aleksander Kolkowski (stroh viola & musical saw) with whom I wasn't previously familiar. Bolstering the ensemble are then a couple of musicians that I've continued featuring in this space, but don't associate with Butcher, Isabelle Duthoit (with her distinctive vocal technique, extended by clarinet...) & Pascal Niggenkemper (double bass) — the latter having actually involved Butcher in his 2017 Wuppertal residency anthology, Sound Within Sound.... Finally, there's Hannah Marshall (cello), and surprisingly, I couldn't find any previous release from her with Butcher — as she's also been prolific on the English scene, as a sophisticated "glue" performer e.g. in Tuning Out (reviewed December 2015). So it's a big group, a distinguished group, not necessarily entirely expected.... And perhaps some parallel should be drawn as well between aspects of articulations on Fluid Fixations & those of the earlier quintet album (of two horns & three strings) from Butcher, Nodosus (also with Davies, recorded back in 2017, as reviewed here April 2022), particularly as it involves trumpet too, there yielding an overall ensemble sound more eerie than assertive. Fluid Fixations is indeed rather different in that sense, stereo effects & a strong presence felt immediately in the mix (by Butcher himself?). There're various restarts for the various tracks too, named evocatively (& totaling over an hour...), but despite the changes throughout the album, there's a strange sense of cohesiveness to it: It's almost as though one is listening to multiple, affective albums at the same time, each involving a fair amount of silence (through which the others sound...), lending a rich & multidimensional feel to the sonic-emotional result. Fluid Fixations is thus much less linear in its approach than Parker's Warszawa 2019 (reviewed here April 2021, but a pre-pandemic performance...) by his Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, i.e. calls over extended landscape, not exactly troubling concepts of foreground per se.... But there's also a distinctive role for both trumpet & piano (& electronics...), something I wouldn't necessarily have anticipated from Butcher. Somehow it almost seems as though this big — at least in forces, if not in label choice... — production is understated then, including with little hype for its release. It can be dramatic too though, with e.g. senses of noir — buoyed by (spectral) senses that "something else" is happening, even when not audible, perhaps suddenly flashing into searing intensity.... Fluid Fixations thus ends up being a distinctive large-scale (& long-form...) release, especially through its multiplicity, very different from anything else previously from Butcher (or to an extent, anyone else). And so it seems to be the next real landmark in his output, i.e. on the heels of the "John Butcher Festival" releases from the end of 2021.

Turning back to Creative Sources, another album extensively featuring electronics, also something of a reprise of an earlier favorite, Mars Reveri involves Miguel A. García (electronics), Abdul Moimême (guitar & metals), Ernesto Rodrigues (piano harp & viola) & Carlos Santos (electronics) returning from Sitsa (recorded in 2018 & first reviewed here in June 2019), now joined by Alex Reviriego (double bass, substituting for more obscure previous performers on organ & amplified paper). And I've continued to enjoy the rather atmospheric Sitsa, a sort of post-industrial church music, its "roar & tinkle" yielding a kind of post-Cage austerity & distance, (ergodic) layerings of organesque tone.... I've mentioned García since then as well with Les Capelles (reviewed September 2022), a quartet album (with an explicitly churchy title...) with Vasco Trilla & accordionist Garazi Navas, actually as it happens my only mention here of (the relatively prolific) Reviriego to this point as well.... And Les Capelles was likewise vague about when it was recorded: Mars Reveri says 2018 in one place & 2020 in another (& I didn't inquire...), but what it states more concretely is that it was mixed via grant in Bilbao in 2023-24. I suspect both are pre-pandemic recordings. In any case, Mars Reveri does make an impression, particularly with its strong opening, grains & static soon suggesting (quasi-Braxtonian) locale, "tinkling" feelings of ascent beginning... & soon plunging into a sort of sonic maw below. Evocations turn to doom, post-industrial again (even glitchy...), perhaps suggesting the more recent Behenii (& Trilla again...) in some ways, albeit there with aggressive horn at least to open.... Versus Sitsa then, lines unwind (less layered or étude-like...), becoming longer arcs, opening sweeping & colorfully twisting vistas.... (Per the cover art, we are supposed to imagine reveling on Mars? The music actually seems more equivocal, the martial reference looming... i.e. as return to war.) And then the unknown "Ibonrg" joins on voice for track #4 (of 5), emphasizing bass (e.g. growling, perhaps pace Phil Minton...), lending some novel textural aspects. Both there & in parts of the longer opening track, there're some unique & compelling textures, finally ending loudly (as if we're finally inside the machine...). So is García still performing? And how much of the sonic result on Mars Reveri involves editing or post-production? It seems that he could be a part of this ongoing conversation on electroacoustic landscapes & textures....

And then the quartet album SDLW (reviewed here in January 2023) seemed to be something of a novelty, pianist Tamara Stefanovich joining the ongoing "composers trio" DLW for an improvised outing — seemingly surveying, fluidly & not in linear fashion, various popular piano styles of the 20th century... — released on a niche classical label. But here they are again, "vibes trio" DLW — Christopher Dell, Christian Lillinger, Jonas Westergaard — releasing Extended Beats (recorded in Berlin & Köln on various dates between October 2022 & May 2023...) on Bastille Musique, complete with substantial essay & interview. The juxtaposition might be even more surprising this time in that Extended Beats continues the series of Beats (reviewed here March 2021) & Beats II (released in 2023, but not reviewed), intricate rhythmically in their breaking up of an elaborate musical "superformula" — in contrast to DLW's Grammar series, which builds from smaller units... — but also suggestive of a pop vibe at times, particularly via the more tonal coloring of Beats II. Yet Extended Beats — which involves a sequence of compositions by DLW, recorded in different sessions & ordered compellingly for the album (but not without possibility for permutation...) — does manage to "sound" more classical overall, often leaving behind the "pop" suggestions, although still with tangible 20th century or jazz evocations through some tracks.... And Stefanovich does return (for four of the eighteen tracks), but there's a whole series of guests, from Klangforum Wien (represented here only by sax, trombone, piano & violin) to Sonar (string) Quartett, and then Martin Adámek (clarinets, previously unknown to me). Johannes Brecht — with whom I first encountered DLW on Boulez Materialism (first reviewed here July 2018) — also returns for the final (& longest) track: That's the only appearance of electronics (for an album that's generally "mixed" in a classical manner...), but it does audibly involve movement beyond tempered scales, including into 3d spatialization. (Maybe they'll do another entire quartet album with Brecht? The live Boulez Materialism was presented as preliminary at the time....) And as the presence of various additional performers does suggest (each appearing on only a few tracks, scattered through the program — with DLW themselves, in fact, absent for a couple of short pieces...), there's also tremendous variety to the overall articulation here, a sort of symphonic result via series of performances, often following without a break.... They're quite clear that this is composed music as well, although DLW did work with their guests on collaborative approaches. (And the composed trio tracks seem especially weighty in context, indeed reasserting DLW's centrality to the proceedings.) So the sonic variety is impressive, and the approach is unique (based e.g. on extensive playing together...), but the affectivity on Extended Beats is not actually very sophisticated: There's a sort of cheerfulness, the basic joy of music & sound, some repose... almost the feel of ballroom dance. (I'm also unsure what to say about the group's stated independence from genre: Genre does sound through at times, so in that sense it's — rather fluid, per SDLW as well — collage....) I do enjoy specifically the addition of horns to the texture (for only a handful tracks) though, and wonder about e.g. possible future quartet projects.... (And do note, if relevant, that the "studio master" version of this album was sent rather awkwardly as a single track. Otherwise, Berlin's Bastille Musique offers first rate production.)

Continuing with another ongoing ensemble, the string trio KSZ (Harald Kimmig, Daniel Studer & Alfred Zimmerlin) return with Black Forest Diary (recorded in Villingen in December 2022), an "electric" album. Indeed despite a previous emphasis on acoustic performance, KSZ has now gone electric. But then I'd already noted that listening mainly to recordings these days — as I don't travel much anymore — is basically moving into the realm of "electronics" (& mediation) all by itself, so in that sense, I'm not hearing much strictly acoustic music these days anyway.... And KSZ aren't the first to shift this way either, recalling e.g. the Sawt Out trio, their second acoustic album Black Current being reviewed here in the same entry (July 2023) as their first electric album, Machine Learning... even as I'd specifically associated their first album with "effects" derived from acoustic instruments, albeit already involving close mic'ing.... That said, my first discussion of KSZ here was actually with John Butcher, for their Leo Records collaboration Raw (recorded in 2015, reviewed here in January 2017). I then revisited their "pure" trio recording Im Hellen (also from 2015) when reviewing And George Lewis (i.e. another "guest" album, December 2019...). All of these albums include some very quiet passages, almost stillness, and this maintains for Black Forest Diary as well, but there's some real intensity at times too. The electric trio (including "transducers & effects pedals" — although Studer isn't credited with "electronics" as Kimmig & Zimmerlin are...) can also take on something of the feel of a rock group at times, embracing even sounds of traffic, but seeming to emerge more from a zoomimetic landscape: Various howling & growling appears, some of which could be anthropomorphic vocalizing..., sometimes moving farther afield too, maybe even into the buzz of wasps or underwater life.... So although there's usually more of a background-foreground distinction (& more range of fauna...), Black Forest Diary can very much recall a recent album such as Dense Bushes with Delicate Chirps (more pastoral, as reviewed here in February...), i.e. zoomimetic calls blending into & emerging out of shifting landscape.... Per its name (which is also its recording location...), Black Forest Diary can also be relatively dark, less "doom" in particular than e.g. Mars Reveri (as reviewed last week), but the growling "rock" voice there does offer some contextual similarities. That's also due in part to the "gap" in instrumental ranges here, i.e. no viola, such that KSZ tends toward low tones while mixing in some rather high highs, i.e. without a lot of middle sometimes. (The mix flavors its brand of zoomimesis as well.) It also calls out for guests, particularly since this "diary" can seem to be more a catalog of possibilities than an expressive arc.... (And sure enough, KSZ Electric Trio is touring with John Butcher this year, so that seems like a tantalizing reprise as well!) So the result does yield a broad zoomimetic tapestry, including interrogation of a sort of animal nexus, e.g. with rock expression (figuring general thresholds perhaps...), but also retaining a latent industrial orientation (including already via electrification per se...), sounding through more directly at times, but often presenting as a kind of hybrid or cyborg. And in this & other factors noted here, although describing KSZ can read much like a general description of various other contemporary musical trends & activity, they've also been developing their own collective interactions over many years, such that they do forge a distinctive sound world (e.g. not so much multi-threaded as spacious...).

A new Anthony Braxton release is always an event, so I was excited to receive Sax QT (Lorraine) 2022 out of the blue last month. Of course, this set — a four performance/CD investigation of Braxton's "Lorraine" system — wasn't unprecedented either: I'd reviewed Duet (Other Minds) 2021 (recorded in October) in September 2022, and even added it to "favorites" despite the relatively limited (but provocative) nature of the release.... To recap, that live selection from the "Other Minds" festival in San Francisco had featured longtime colleague James Fei (also on saxophones) alongside Braxton & his SuperCollider electronics (pace DCWM...). It also began & ended on unisons, initiating a Braxtonian look at "spectral music" ideas, small shifts & divergences of pitch (or "the sonic winds of breath..." as Braxton puts it), i.e. beyond (Western) standard twelve-tone (discrete note) polyphony. Braxton had seemed relatively bound by the chromatic scale to this point, making this an exciting development for me, and Sax QT (Lorraine) 2022 was very quickly a success to my ears: Braxton fleshes out the more preliminary ideas, not just alongside another saxophonist, but alongside three other saxophonists, a wondrous array of integral consort polyphony, with the players not bound to stay in their own specific registers either. And there're still the electronics as well, now more into microintervals, twisting... contextualizing while reacting, almost reversing the flow of time-causality... but also seeming almost like a last thin tablecloth, ready to be snatched away to leave the plates/music behind intact.... As reflected in some comments in the CD file that I created for the set then, I heard it with great anticipation, and digested a pretty good chunk quickly... I was primed to write, clearly... and then later that same day (yes, the same day, not even after midnight in California...), Braxton himself released (on New Braxton House) 10 Comp (Lorraine) 2022. So then I was pretty quickly overloaded mentally, and needed to take a break on writing about the music to listen more.... And it's not that 10 Comp (Lorraine) 2022 really changed my opinion of Sax QT (Lorraine) 2022, but it did offer far more context on the Lorraine system in general. Another thing I also already did was discuss the chronology of these recordings, so let me do that again here for this intro (& so remove it from the CD file...): 10 Comp (Lorraine) 2022 uses two different ensembles, a trio (plus electronics) for six CDs & a quartet (likewise with electronics, for all of these...) for four CDs. Readers who follow these big Braxton issues will also recall that he often releases sets of four, and the "six" is actually more a two plus four. The first two albums, recorded in October 2021 (in Riga & Prague) seem relatively preliminary, although something more starts to come together during the second. (The first sounds very preliminary indeed.) These are with Susana Santos Silva — new to the Braxton universe, as far as I've heard — & Adam Matlock, already from e.g. (the great, music of transitions...) 12 Comp (ZIM) 2017. Then, still in October 2021, came Duet (Other Minds) 2021 — & I was able to familiarize myself with this album quite a bit, so it does serve as an ongoing guidepost. And then in November 2021 (in Ulm, Lisbon, Puerto Real & Luxembourg), the remaining trio recordings were made, more sophisticated now (& e.g. with Matlock really letting go on the vocal part, often accompanying himself with accordion, so almost into a quartet formation...), but still with relatively open textures & aggressive calls around trumpet. Next came the quartet recordings, two a day over a two-day span in May 2022 (in New Haven, so a typical Braxton setup lately for committing ideas to record), again with Fei, and now two bassists (Zach Rowden & Carl Testa): The basses are generally more subdued & textural than the horns, blending more into the electronics & so forging a richer landscape (versus more open calls...), playing up & filling in the harmonies in particular. (And note that the Duet composition number is between those of the trio & quartet tours, so later in conception sequence than in performance sequence....) Then a mere ten days after those studio recordings came another European tour (Vilnius, Bologna, Antwerp, Rome), this time producing Sax QT (Lorraine) 2022 — Fei & Chris Jonas & André Vida (for CD1 only) & Ingrid Laubrock (for the remainder) joining Braxton on saxes.... Therefore the longest point of "repose" in this sequence is actually between the trio & quartet outputs of 10 Comp (Lorraine) 2022, with the quartet (i.e. with basses) seeming to be almost a transition on the way to the more full-throated (literally — or rather, I guess, "winds of breath...") expressions of the sax quartet. Perhaps that's an artifact of my coincidental history of hearing (i.e. my aesthetic narrative...), but the sax quartet also seems to make the richest use of the Lorraine ideas (i.e. basically about line against line...). And I should note as well the sense of excitement that comes from having so much new to hear at once: Braxton can still keep me engaged for 12+ hours of music.

Regarding 10 Comp (Lorraine) 2022 in particular, besides including a couple of more "preliminary" performances, these albums tend to run more toward three quarters of an hour (as had the Duet...), i.e. rather than the full hour of so many prior Braxton sets, so the whole thing might be a little less imposing than some of those earlier sets (& the ZIM set had already involved some similar adjustments...). Nonetheless, there's much to take in, beginning with the strange "broken consort" of the trio formation, Braxton on a variety of saxophones (& SuperCollider...) along with Adam Matlock (accordion & voice) & Susana Santos Silva (trumpet). I'd mentioned Matlock (from the ZIM set) & his accordion (per the prior paragraph's remark on the basses...) does seem to blend into the electronics at various points (whereas for ZIM it can seem to be part of a timbral substitute for electronics...), partially extending that tapestry & serving as backdrop for various (often aggressive...) melodic explorations from sax, trumpet & voice. (And then I should note Santos Silva specifically as a prolific performer in this broad space as well, seemingly expanding her scope with this project.... As it happens, the first mention of Santos Silva here was with Vasco Trilla on The Paradox of Hedonism, reviewed February 2017....) And I do find my prior hearing of the Duet to be coloring my hearing of this trio as well, basically as reference point, particularly given the "canonical" two saxophones.... Still, taking this ensemble on its own does allow & bring to ear various more distinctive textures (with the electronics themselves seeming very much in "learning" mode early on too...): It can be dramatic, scurrying chases & exclamations... jagged & wild, bluesy. And then the quartet with basses — Zach Rowden & Carl Testa, as noted — does seem more mellow (with the the basses indeed seeming to blend more with electronics — & each other...): Besides James Fei (who, as it happened, first appeared in this space with another AACM legend performing composed music, on Roscoe Mitchell's Angel City, reviewed February 2015...), Rowden & Testa have worked with Braxton over the years too, but were first mentioned here (together, as it happens!) with Tyshawn Sorey's massive Pillars (reviewed October 2018)... followed by Testa again with his own Sway Prototypes (in an April 2020 review), Sway having also been programmed in SuperCollider.... And as noted, I can't help but hear this double bass quartet as leading into the "full" saxophone quartet, but that's surely my loss.... Everything does come off more smoothly here, with an air of that hard-won "Ghost Trance" sophistication, i.e. the way that Braxton (re)orders & interrogates intervals of time.... (So feelings of spectrality come more to the fore, versus the extrovert trio.) Taken together then, especially given its length, 10 Comp (Lorraine) 2022 can seem to be another "big production," i.e per some recent entries here, but it's really two (or three...) sets together, a trio & a quartet, so not especially large in forces at any particular moment. Also, I almost have to ask, what does it say (especially about the United States) that Braxton does these live "demo" tours in Europe? I guess the Duet did happen in San Francisco, so that's worth noting.... (And "Thank you!" to Anthony Braxton for putting so much of his "process" out there for those of us listening at home!)

That said, now that I've already included two paragraphs here, as well as general congratulatory comments directed toward Braxton personally — & before I get to more specific thoughts about the new sax quartet... — I should probably also note a recent release of older recordings: Four Compositions (Wesleyan) 2013 appeared late last year as the first release from a new label associated with a longstanding venue, Prague Music Performance (PMP). Recorded that January, the 4CD set thus dates from shortly before Trio (New Haven) 2013, and features the renowned Swiss "avant classical" duo of Roland Dahinden (trombone) & Hildegard Kleeb (piano). It's also described as Falling River Music, with nothing about Diamond Curtain Wall Music, although assertive electronics do appear at various points. That's unlike Trio (New Haven) 2013, but of course e.g. 12 Duets (DCWM) 2012 (with its ubiquitous SuperCollider tapestry) had already been recorded by then. And then the main compositions here (363, 364 twice & 366 — for a typical total of nearly four hours of music) overlap with those on both of the cited landmark releases appearing in 2014 (which had themselves overlapped...). So this is something of a curious transition moment or style, as well as features piano (as something of a throwback...). It's also curious that the release was delayed so long, particularly given the stature of the guest musicians. It's certainly worth hearing though: I only learned of it this month via Naxos (i.e. classical) distribution, but now see that it's also on e.g. Qobuz since this past September.... And I might have skipped noting an older recording such as this otherwise, but Four Compositions (Wesleyan) 2013 does seem as though it could be easy to miss.

So finally when it comes to Sax QT (Lorraine) 2022, there's actually a history of saxophone quartets, but not a very substantial Braxtonian history. That's the theme of the liner notes (on this release from I dischi di Angelica out of Bologna...) anyway, "timbre uniformity," citing some sparse Braxton examples. The music emerges conceptually from unisons, but that isn't addressed directly, although there's worthwhile commentary, even as I suppose it's different from how I personally interact with the music.... (It yields a sense of entire worlds opening from the smallest spaces, rather vistas to those worlds, I might say....) Moreover, the saxes don't remain in different registers: The first performance (from Vilnius) involves André Vida on baritone sax, but not exclusively, and then for the final three albums, it's Ingrid Laubrock on soprano & tenor. James Fei (like Braxton, who adds soprano as well) then sticks with alto & sopranino here (after also playing bari for the Duet...), with Chris Jonas on alto & tenor. (There's thus a "high quartet" available from tenor to sopranino, but also a lot of pairings.) Of course Fei continues in this music, but both Jonas & Vida also have histories with Braxton back to the 1990s: I hadn't mentioned either yet, but in particular this isn't the first sax quartet for Jonas, who along with Fei, had appeared already on Braxton's Composition No. 169 (double CD with orchestra, released on Leo Records in 2001), along with e.g. on Fei's own Alto Quartets (also recorded circa twenty-five years ago — with guest Braxton!). And then Laubrock, at the peak of her own compositional work these days, returns already from 12 Comp (ZIM) 2017.... (And perhaps it's worth noting as well that the latter was released on blu-ray in high-def, while the recent Lorraine sets are physically "only" on CD. I suspect the blu-ray product didn't sell well, but download high-def would be appreciated, as was paired for 10 Comp (Lorraine) 2022 — but not for the sax quartet.... In any case, let me also note that this isn't the first Braxton release by the label, Duo (Bologna) 2018 — with harpist Jacqueline Kerrod — having already been mentioned in the ZIM review, July 2021, where harp is noted as another acoustic timbral component seemingly blending to suggest SuperCollider electronics....) Aside from much earlier quartet formations though (including ongoing classic formations such as Rova), more recently here, it's probably also worth noting the very dense sax quartet album (D)IVO (as recorded in January 2022 & reviewed here in February 2022) from Ivo Perelman, featuring a wide variety of saxophone interactions & textures, tending toward the more raucous (or even argumentative...), but also involving at times similar senses of line & intertwinings (despite the basic registers & chromatic sieve...), yet without Braxton's temporal-tapestry sense of extended multi-time.... Instead of glimpsing new worlds, Perelman & company come off as highly (human per se &) rhetorical. Both take a sort of "kitchen sink" approach to melodic-motivic expression & reference though, i.e. everything in play & coming from odd angles. Particularly with Sax QT (Lorraine) 2022 & its electronics then, the result is something of a hall of mirrors, "generative" (pace some recent comments here...) senses of melody-polyphony combining into & out of foreground. And in that sense, the colors of the horns add considerably to this "timbre music" — even generating it (e.g. via difference tones). And particularly with the narrower ranges between horns, textural intertwining (& so in turn generativity...) becomes more intricate. Various "inner spaces" thus open kaleidoscopically (as geometric-acoustic analogs to the Ghost Trance rhythmic-temporal spinning...). So this is Great American Music. And the production is indeed of excellent quality, from a label offering other important releases from American composers (Oliveros, Wolff...), the only caveat being a choice made (presumably) by Braxton himself: Speaking begins immediately after the music ends, not even waiting a beat, to be followed soon by long applause.... The producers divide the single album tapestries into multiple tracks, for no particular reason, but they don't make a separate track for the talking & applause. Oh well. Nonetheless I anticipate that Sax QT (Lorraine) 2022 will attract attention for quite some time, or at least my own.... After all, Braxton does continue to develop & forge new musical constellations of distinct relevance, above & beyond his prior (already highly distinguished) contributions.

After A tale unfolds (reviewed here last month), Ernesto Rodrigues & João Madeira return again, also with Monsieur Trinité, for Free to Open (recorded in Lisbon earlier this month). For this live outing from the Creative Sources Cycle, instead of adding three musicians (including two clarinetists) to the quintet lineup on their "instant classic" Dérive (yielding consequent, smoother textures as an octet...), they instead pare down to a quartet (i.e. minus cello) with Carlos Bechegas (piccolo, flute & alto flute). So whereas when reviewing Open in Finder (with Madeira & Bechegas) last November, I'd noted the long gap in the flautist's discography, thinking the release was an unusual event, there was already Secrets under Trees (with Rodrigues, both of these first new trio releases adding cello...), and then soon after, Echoing the Chorus of Life (also reviewed here last month) with Rodrigues & Bechegas & Carlos Santos on electronics.... Now there's yet more, and Free to Open comes off as a relatively experimental outing, sometimes in more static or repetitive textures, but also striving for new combos, including with Rodrigues increasingly featuring crackle box (alongside viola) for what can eventually seem like some vocalizing passages (alongside some throatier flute as well... & perhaps some other electric "small toys" from Trinité?). And note e.g. that Bruno Parrinha already played quite a bit of flute (alongside his usual clarinet) on Dérive, so the substitution here of Bechegas is not as big an ensemble shift as it might even appear. (And speaking further of clarinet, let me also mention now another new quartet album from Rodrigues: Xafnikes synantiseis pairs Floros Floridis — born 1952, returning to Creative Sources already following Fields, as also reviewed here last month — with a string trio, recalling the first Lisbon String Trio "guest" album K'Ampokol Che K'Aay at times, the former recorded also last month in Berlin.... These kinds of ensembles have certainly become more frequent in improv over the past few years....) And the first track on Free to Open does open with an attractive & quiet pointillism then, recalling portions of Dérive, indeed employing various of the wavelike exchanges that've become a feature of Rodrigues albums lately, but in turn also unusually opening to more in the way of soloing, with the second track then bringing more linear, layered or banded interactions. There's again various zoomimesis involved, including into a sort of jungle vibe (becoming industrial-hybrid at times too). Both there and in the shorter final track (of this hour+ session), senses of building up materials over time are involved as well, yielding more extended arcs & independence of line (i.e. with lighter harmonic fill...). There's a general opening of texture, but also more in the way of stasis at times, perhaps stormy (e.g. with roiling bass...), but more often tending toward sparseness or setting melodic line against melodic line. Free to Open thus does feel as though it's an "opening" for this intriguing quartet (& I have to wonder if it's implying the term "open improv" as well...), beginning from other recent work, but also soon striving for novel textures, moving into the unknown....

Magda Mayas returns this month with a couple of releases by ongoing ensembles: Confluence by the octet Filamental had made quite an impression on me, i.e. as an album from 2021 that I listened to rather frequently for a while for its subtly building, flowing quality.... And now there's a reprise, Ritual Mechanics (apparently recorded in 2023...): Amazingly the latter brings back the same Filamental octet, something easier said than done in this music, although with a difference: The individual musicians were (with the exception of Mayas together with Angharad Davies — the latter appearing here again with a larger ensemble, shortly after Fluid Fixations...) recorded separately. There's no elaboration on this point, so I'm thinking these were not simultaneous recordings at all, but rather superposed later (i.e. as mixed by Tony Buck). There're also two tracks, with the second (title) track seeming more sophisticated, so I wonder too if the two compositions were conceived & recorded at one time, or serially. Anyway, Ritual Mechanics does present plenty of presence from the start, but less of the subtle harmonics of Confluence, making an impression, but not with the same sort of fluidity. There's a sense of distance, not unlike a Cage Number Piece, different materials combining (almost indifferently?) into a broad temporal mosaic. And perhaps one would call it austere, but not really quiet.... And then another significant difference is that Mayas isn't on piano here, rather rhodes & harmonium (one for each track, it seems). So there's more of an "electric" vibe, fitting with the recording medium as becoming more central to the collective expression. The sense of "rite" (& e.g. harmonium) even recalls Great Waitress & e.g. their classic Flock.... So the results on Ritual Mechanics can end up seeming less "alive" than the previous (co-situated) entity, but there's also a distinctive sense of brightness & illumination that can be rewarding, less linear (& more arbitrary?) in its presentation.

And then Hour Music (recorded in Lucerne last September) is actually the third album from Mayas (on piano here...) together with Christoph Erb (tenor & soprano saxophones) & Gerry Hemingway (drums, voice & controlled feedback), following Bathing Music & Dinner Music, both from a 2020 tour — the latter mentioned here tangentially (as is my habit...) in a December 2022 review. I didn't really discuss those trio albums around piano at the time, but Mayas does continue to intrigue, including with this ongoing "working" trio, specifically by seeking a sort of hybridity beyond (or between) the chromatic limitations of the piano keyboard: I've started to cite some similar ensembles in this regard, i.e. "fusing" piano resonances with horn & percussion (e.g. Thirty Nine Fifty Five, last mentioned also in a September review here...), but also arguably earlier e.g. with Hemingway: Grey Matter (with Jean Luc Cappozzo & Christine Wodrascka) was reviewed here in February 2014, and although it's relatively old-fashioned compared to Hour Music, some of the latter's timbral combos are anticipated.... And then Mayas is now teaching in Lucerne, where Hemingway remains (after recently retiring), and where Erb is from (I think) — so presumably this trio is going to continue to refine its kind of ensemble (& does have more tour dates announced...), i.e. naturalistic & flowing but also somber. There's a sense of twisting transformation, i.e. almost a "surface" to the collective sound being warped & bent over the course of the single extended track.... And this Luzern Trio does project an ambience of silence too (unlike the sometimes noisier Ritual Mechanics), a situated sense of almost empirical investigation: I sometimes write about "outdoor" or "indoor" music here (by which I mean the sounds evoked, not necessarily the listening setting...), and Hour Music seems to be especially liminal in this regard — beyond exploring liminality more generally in terms of overtone spectra & timbral combos — even into the physically direct: It's almost as if we're on a porch, almost outdoors, almost indoors, in between, e.g. with some shelter from the rain but maybe becoming damp.... There're thus multiple senses of "between" being cultivated. And there's quasi-lyrical continuity as well, including some birdsong. Anyway, all three albums from this trio came out on Veto Records, with which Erb (b.1973) seems to be associated, although he also seems to be relatively quiet otherwise.

Olaf Rupp most recently appeared in this space with the classic "guitar trio" formation of Puna (reviewed in November, with the Klanggalerie label subsequently adding it & other relevant items to their Bandcamp site...), but he's already been quite active in 2024: Live in Stockholm, a followup to Rupp / Tom / Mahall (as reviewed here in September 2019), and Thorax, an extended textural duo with Axel Döner, both recorded in 2023, were released earlier. And all three of these cited albums find Rupp on electric guitar, involving rock allusions as well (although more atomized for the duo...), but the new Entropy Hug instead places Rupp between a couple of lyrical reed players (Lothar Ohlmeier & Frank Paul Schubert), and while still employing electric guitar, projects more the sense of classical chamber music (pace some "cool jazz" rhetoric...). In fact, the brief accompanying remarks from the Not Applicable collective are to the point, so I'll quote them extensively: They promise a "multifaceted collective sound that is always in motion and always poses the right questions to the listener's expectations" per a "radically unconditioned sound progression" & "completely new possibilities for transforming the colour of individual notes and combined sounds into a lively texture, free of stylistic or dramaturgical restrictions." So this is the sort of thing I've been talking about here, at various points.... (More strangely, the remarks also compare the ensemble to a classical piano trio. Well, it's a trio — of bass clarinet, soprano saxophone & electric guitar....) Let's turn to a couple of examples then, one older & one newer: Neigen, released by Ayler Records & reviewed here in January 2021, involves a quartet with three horn players (including Daunik Lazro & Jean Luc Cappozzo, the latter cited in the previous paragraph, as it happens...) around violin (including octave electric violin, on which performer Michael Nick comes off more akin to Rupp here...). I'd remarked at the time about a sense of distance evoked there, a sort of temporal calm I suppose, and wondered whether it was a (pandemic time) distance recording (but it wasn't...) — while there's also a sort of chamber-pastoral vibe, yielding a variety of dynamics, but also with a strong sense of calls.... Dense Bushes with Delicate Chirps, reviewed here in February (after being recorded late last year), involves two horns around violin, much more "chordal" than Udo Schindler's more typical sinewy melodic style, but also with a sense of naturalism (& relatively high tessitura). So both of these albums have an "outdoor" kind of vibe, as well as a sense of line (& even melody) navigating some relatively dense (but not very fast...) harmonic-spectral spaces. Entropy Hug (the recording date for which isn't given, but I'm guessing recent...) then involves a lyrical sense as well, but not of the outdoors: It's much more rhetorical or even classical, indeed evoking chamber music per se, and involving what seem to be purely human concerns through ringing chords & angular motifs.... It also involves guitar (rather than violin, a strange coincidence in my comparisons, but of course itself classical...), generally more capable of maintaining background resonance or subtle feedback-swell, but also pointillistic & detailed moving upward in the texture at times. So Ohlmeier (bass clarinet) was new to me, but he's also the listed member of Not Applicable (which appeared here previously with "trombone trio" Der Dritte Stand, reviewed July 2022...), while Schubert actually dates back to (rock inspired...) Grid Mesh & Live in Madrid for me (as reviewed November 2013...). And maybe I should note as well that Rupp does record on acoustic guitar, including recent solos, so it's clearly a choice to feature electric in this quasi-classical setting, although e.g. the highly detailed Myotis Myotis duo (reviewed here November 2022) had used electric as well.... So there's generally a mellow vibe to Entropy Hug, becoming more intense at times as well (so recalling the unrelated Neigen perhaps in its dynamics...), sometimes hovering or understated, human-rhetorical, but again with vivid timbral combos "twisting" (per the previous paragraph too...) hybrid-timbral surfaces/shapes. Entropy Hug also projects a strong sense of choice, i.e. doesn't come off as arbitrary or haphazard (as some improv might... or as "entropy" might imply...), but as clearly & distinctly assertive, yes twisting as it goes (e.g. involving arpeggiation as a kind of momentum?), but always with an assured sense of the next step in its wandering. (It's the deliberate pace that recalls Neigen for me as well, there still oriented on calls per se, so less radical....) The result is then a kind of lyrical spectral counterpoint, often tightly articulated, but accommodating individual lines & a variety of ongoing (human oriented...) motion.

Continuing with another blended entry, this time starting from a couple of recent Joëlle Léandre releases: Léandre's recorded duo project with vocalist Lauren Newton dates to at least 1997, with the album 18 Colors on Leo Records, and continues (through at least October 2022) with the album Great Star Theater, San Francisco, released last week by Other Minds. (And Newton herself has already appeared here, but only with Léandre — & pianist Myra Melford — on Stormy Whispers, reviewed June 2020....) As might be implied, particularly with the focus on voice (including Léandre's at times, with the bass sometimes seeming more as accompaniment...), Great Star Theater, San Francisco is quite an intimate production too, relatively short overall, but with each of the five tracks being carefully sculpted & building in intensity, followed immediately by release of spontaneous applause. And of all the Léandre formations, the duo with Newton provides the most confusion as to who is who: Although Newton is a singer only, and so the bass is clearly Léandre's, the pairing can be rather close (with such similar voices, i.e. evoking the latter's solo work...) — sort of a shamanic-spectral introvert ecstasy, each movement forging a world, an extended meditation on life.... — the two almost merging into the immediacy of the exchange. Far more extrovert (& discrete) then is Live in St. Johann, recorded in March 2023 & featuring Léandre in a "piano trio" with Elisabeth Harnik & Zlatko Kaucic. The latter has become something of a fixture with Léandre of late, including with the Jubileum Quartet & A uiš? (reviewed here July 2020), but also already on e.g. A Woman's Work (the 8CD set, first mentioned here in February 2017...) & Beauty / Resistance (a 3CD set, reviewed May 2021...). Kaucic recorded the duo album One Foot in the Air (in 2022, also released — as had been these other Léandre albums — on Not Two in 2023) with Harnik as well — the latter having recorded the duo album Tender Music (released in 2018 by Trost) with Léandre.... And then not only did Harnik most recently appear in this space with Plasmic & their Live At Porgy & Bess (reviewed here January 2023), but to "double" this entry further, has released the quartet album Flight Mode Live in Berlin 2023 (on Poland's Sluchaj as well... as had been Stormy Whispers...) in the same batch as Live in St. Johann: Both are high energy albums, featuring sometimes-swirling piano & strong rhythmic drives, with Flight Mode including the international who's who of Harri Sjöström (here in much jazzier guise than recent mentions in this space...), Tony Buck (just mentioned here again too, with Magda Mayas...) & John Edwards (who can sometimes appear to be everywhere...). Flight Mode Live in Berlin 2023 can still feel rhetorical amid a frenetic surface of (jazzy) activity, and similarly, Live in St. Johann can involve some static passages & qualities (especially from piano...) within what otherwise seems a very dynamic ensemble.... And although Live in St. Johann can seem (merely) celebratory at times (pace Jubileum...), it's also in a classic "piano trio" format — albeit sometimes with extensive voice irruptions (as some of the most intense parts...) — so perhaps bears noting more extensively: I'd featured Léandre's previous, and apparently quite personally curated, piano trio album (with John Tilbury & Kevin Norton) on Live at the Ulrichsberger Kaleidophon (also from Leo, recorded in 2009, but not reviewed here until October 2013...), a generally Cageian tapestry of sometimes stark, resonant slowness.... So Live in St. Johann is very different, but involves some distinctive textures as well, and if not always quite as compelling as its pregnant opening portends, does still involve narratives of intimacy & triumph (from a more distant perspective, perhaps...). And then maybe I should note finally hEARoes on Rogueart as well (released in 2023, but not reviewed here...), Craig Taborn the pianist with (longtime Léandre colleague) Mat Maneri... but also a new 4CD Lifetime Rebel soon to appear there (with content unknown to me...). Léandre's albums continue to be significant, but more are starting to seem on the reflective or celebratory side, rather than bringing an immediacy or pushing forward.... Perhaps it's no surprise then that the ongoing duo with Newton provides more of the latter situation, with comfort built over years, but any pairing continuing so long does also pose a danger of becoming stale.... And I suppose it's not easy becoming an ambassador either (i.e. surely as complicating a focus on one's own creative work...).

Electric (with pedal galore...) guitarist Han-earl Park produces "beautifully messy, joyously difficult, ambiguous and discordant improvised musics," and seems to revel in enigma as well. Yet I'm not the only listener who seems ready to hear Park's relatively infrequent recorded offerings: Whereas I did review Anomic Aphasia (back in October 2015), as well as the second full followup from his trio Eris 136199, Peculiar Velocities (in December 2020) — but ended up missing Juno 3 (by a different trio including the prolific Pat Thomas... recorded in 2022 & released in 2023), generally more wave-like & less pointillistic-thorny than these other trios... — the new Gonggong 225088 trio (recorded live in Berlin in December 2023) has already been reviewed over at Free Jazz Blog (much to my surprise, noticing just as I was completing my notes here...). So what is happening in this music? What is it about? I found myself already asking these questions — & of course Park's propensity to include strange six-digit numbers only adds to its enigma... — & responding in part with a sort of postmodern materialism, kinds of punk (or funk) sensibilities (albeit largely abstracted from genre here...). I was thinking how this music seems to liquefy rhetoric.... Which it does, but that's not obliteration either, as musical figures are decontextualized, retaining contours or colors, refigured into flowing streams.... (I've sometimes suggested in the past, since the June 2020 review of First and Second..., that e.g. Belgian guitarist Dirk Serries applies a "linearization regime.") So there is a significant sense of (flowing) continuity to Gonggong 225088. In fact, continuity — the keeping going... — may be the essence of punk. (So this music is about survival?) And this trio can barely be stopped, with Gonggong 225088 lasting over 70 minutes, basically seeming entirely continuously produced. Is this possible? There're no signs of an audience.... And track breaks seem only to occur as a transformation is accomplished, beginning immediately from that point for the (continuous...) transformation that will occupy the next track. (The third track, the beginning of the Niche Shift sequence, involves such an insectoid quiet... I'm not entirely sure about the continuity from the slow arc of calming that ends the second — & the former is the longest track as well — but returning to the Autopoiesis sequence — the title of which seems plenty descriptive itself... pace the ecological implications of the "shifts..." — confirms the general position of track breaks as points of functional maximum or minimum....) Gonggong 225088, and Park in general, is also very much about the collective sound & ensemble: It's their interplay & especially their mutual coordination that makes the album sound distinctive, starting immediately from its opening. Is this a composition? They seem to begin mid-elaborate polyphonic material, promptly invoking the latter's continuous transformation, e.g. smoothing prickly parts, prickling smooth parts, but not with sudden shifts, rather continuous transformations, including (perhaps background) slides of tempo.... And so the collaborators here do seem very much in tune with each other, Camila Nebbia (saxophone) — who last year released e.g. Una ofrenda a la ausencia as part of Relative Pitch's often groundbreaking solo saxophone series... — & Yorgos Dimitriadis (b.1964; percussion with electronics, meaning e.g. using a contact microphone in his left hand with a drumstick in his right...) — who's appeared in this space (both in 2014...) with Red Dhal Sextet & trumpet trio Chats with the Real McCoy.... Indeed the younger Nebbia (from Argentina) seems the perfect sax partner for Park.... Gonggong 225088 is then an album that can be immediately engaging, but that can be overwhelming too, quickly moving into its intricate senses of detail: It almost seems an overgrown thicket at times, and one can easily lose one's place. Periods of quiet don't provide an orientation, by themselves, either. (And I'm a little surprised that this sonically rich release doesn't come in greater than 16bit. The label Waveform Alphabet has a slowly growing & eclectic catalog, much of it less openly discordant....) And then regarding my thoughts on survival, is surviving somehow equivalent to transforming? Did anything really change? Or is the impression of Gonggong 225088 in the end more one of stasis? (A sense of repetition-stasis within frenetic activity had animated my reaction to Harnik from the previous entry.... But then, a piano cannot help but project something of the past.) Composed or not then, there's a fluid sense of material & coordination here that does continue to resonate (perhaps still enigmatically...) somehow: Maybe that sense can be called biological-logistical (pace e.g. my reading of Harney/Moten together with Anna Tsing...).

Senses of materiality, particularly themes of bodily materialism, animate another album I want to discuss this week: This Full Mouth, recorded in Berlin in March (& very soon to appear on Creative Sources...), seems to be something of a development for percussionist Ben Bennett, joining the father-son team of Ernesto & Guilherme Rodrigues in Europe for an ambitious trio outing. Bennett has largely been recording only within a narrow group, i.e. Jack Wright & the other "family" musicians from Rawl (per the review here in February...), along with US sax player Michael Foster (himself last appearing here with the quartet album Glow, reviewed January 2023...), so meeting these Lisbon musicians in Berlin seems to be another step. (This is after Bennett had already released Petrichor on Creative Sources, but from within his usual musical cohort, as reviewed here in November 2021....) And of course the Rodrigueses are fixtures in this space, including for their trios with various "guests," the two most recent being Con versa tions (recorded back in 2021 with fiddler Gerhard Uebele, and more tonal per se than most of their sets...) & Live at Sonic Krause (a "digital only" release with electric guitarist Hannes Buder, previously unknown to me), while the two prior were Secrets under Trees (reviewed November 2023) & L'âge de l'oreille (reviewed May 2023) — and of course there're various classics, e.g. RRR (reviewed August 2018) to mention Olaf Rupp again.... (And the two did finally release a duo album too, Intenso como o Mar recorded in Lisbon this past December, featuring a poem by Ernesto....) In any case, the release with Bennett comes as something of a surprise, but also as an opportunity to ponder a US musician I'd been following coming to record with Rodrigues (per e.g. Blaise Siwula & K'Ampokol Che K'Aay...): Bennett can be difficult to feature at times, it seems, as This Full Mouth can lack a bit of foreground, e.g. as low rubbed percussion or other subtle interventions (& senses of hiding...), but he also does animate a general percussive sense through the ensemble, pizzicato, scrapings, various short string figures moving through a generally pointillistic texture. There's also a sort of darkness to the music, surely suggesting the nocturnal at times (pace Ernesto's series of nocturne-esque albums, the most recent — for quintet with piano — simply titled Nocturne...), vocal-esque at times too (per rubbed percussion...) or even zoomimetic (not unusually...), quiet & growling through a (broad...) sense of dusk — but also invoking the industrial, with light street traffic, lonely.... (So themes of continuity & survival do seem to apply again here as well....) This sort of foreboding or barren landscape (& sense of distension...) then contrasts with Bennett's cultivated sunny disposition, i.e. videos of him sitting & smiling for hours.... Perhaps that might be described as a situated circumstance, whereas for This Full Mouth, things become unsituated. Or maybe the landscape is actually more uncertain than barren.... (And track titles do delve more into the depths of bodily materialism, seeming to recall the Foster collaboration....) Some passages are indeed quiet too, pensive, scuffling.... The general result is even a sort of calming, at least superficially then, but also a deep-seated ambivalence (almost looming anxiety...), a yearning for other worlds perhaps, but also a determination to stick with this world, to appreciate this world... i.e. not necessarily a good world, but our (ongoing, material...) world. Abiding.

Carlos Santos (b.1967) has been something of a fixture in this space as well, although usually more in the background: Santos has designed most of the Creative Sources packages for years, so his work has often been in front of my eyes (as I've remarked upon it here at times...), but often in front of my ears too — as Santos has appeared musically on many albums, mostly with Ernesto Rodrigues. And usually he's been credited with "electronics," but these are rarely of the "in your face" sort, rather an added high (or low) pitch here & there, extending tones, shaping harmonics... & now more often on "modular synth," although his actual contributions seem similar. Santos hadn't been as active musically the past few years, at least not so that I noticed anyway, but that's changed lately with a recent burst of albums (all on Creative Sources). I particularly want to focus on Cobra then, the latest album from Lisbon String Trio, recorded last month with Santos as their guest: Cobra continues to be something of a departure for LST (Rodrigues, Miguel Mira & Alvaro Rosso), first in that it adds electronics, and second in that it continues a trend of adding a frequent Rodrigues collaborator — as opposed to the earlier recordings, which involved relative unknowns, then followed more with "stars" of the Portuguese scene. Recordings have become less frequent as well: Isotropy (with Luis Lopes, there on acoustic guitar...) was reviewed here in May 2020, and already presents less of a concertante interaction, with Lopes fitting more into the texture, and often (somewhat tentatively) following the trio. The next LST album was then Dada (reviewed in May 2022) with Bruno Parrinha, who'd been making an extensive series of recordings with Rodrigues at the time, likewise staying (as usual) within the texture, inflecting resonances etc. — to yield an album exploring a variety of motivic shadings & inflections. So these descriptions might fit Cobra as well, now with electronics! The result is a sort of supercharged string trio, with extra range & richer harmonics, yet not immediately noticeable as involving electronics. In this, an obvious comparison is with the latest from string trio KSZ, now also electric (& more noticeable as such) on Black Forest Diary (as reviewed here in April): There the string players employ electronics themselves (rather than involve a fourth musician), and the result is more novelty, almost creaturely at times (pace industrial hybridity...), various extremes, but also evolving within an ethos of quiet/Silence. Cobra can sometimes be more quiet or thin, but is also generally assertive, maintaining a sense of a coherent arc — already a feature of LST since their trio-only Proletariat debut (reviewed here in July 2017, as part of a massive entry...) — with the coordination of e.g. its opening gesture being among the most striking of its passages (i.e. before the texture loosens at times...). Of course, orientations around silence are not uncommon for Rodrigues, and Santos has been involved with various such projects: Impulses and Signals, from their trio with Nuno Torres (named Rotor... so presumably intending more?), recorded in early 2023 (but not released until later, as mentioned here in March...), had already projected more of an open, Cageian vibe (although not especially quietly) — even a sense of desolation developing over its relatively long length.... That vibe then continues to a degree with the new Synopsis (also recorded last month, two days before Cobra...), with André Hencleeday (another regular collaborator...) joining the "Rotor" trio on piano: That album ends up with more clashes & (motivic) intricacy around piano, although it begins with modifications of already struck tones... & both highlight individual sounds more than the denser interactions typical of LST. It's also typical of Santos to be a "second keyboard" there (as arguably also on Mars Reveri, as reviewed in April...), per e.g. Quelque chose prie la patience des nuages — reviewed here in May 2022 as part of the same "set" of post-pandemic Rodrigues releases as Chiaroscuro, a bass-less quartet (albeit sans Santos) that might also be worth comparing to Cobra: The former can come off as "more classical" at times, but conversely features percussion (e.g. yielding a sense of attack, pace piano elsewhere — i.e. versus the generally smoother tones of Santos...) & a sort of "crispness" grounded in the acoustic realm (with clarinet handling more of the "electronic" background resonances...). Maybe that's a strained comparison, but the "shifting waves" of so many recent Rodrigues projects are well developed on both, tending darker or even becoming stormy on Cobra.... And then there's also the new Surrealistisk, a long quartet album (recorded this past April) with Rodrigues & Santos joined by Girilal Baars (voice) & Monsieur Trinité (percussion): The latter returns already from e.g. Free to Open (also reviewed here in April), while Rodrigues is also on crackle box (again, per Synopsis & Impulses and Signals...), adding to the sense of overall weirdness (apparently including squeeze toys from Trinité, as already speculated in the earlier review...) with its vocalization vibe. (And Surrealistisk once again features a generally open texture or landscape, quite a bit of distension, with an emphasis on strange sounds. The same might be said of Die Zwitscher Maschine as well, recorded already in May 2023 — after Impulses and Signals... — by Rodrigues & Santos with Parrinha & Flak, and featuring its own rendering of a sometimes-desolate landscape amid both zoomimesis & ringing "new age" tones.... And maybe I should mention Santos' earlier duo with cellist Ulrich Mitzlaff, I/O & their 2021 album Studies on Colour Field Modulation too....) And then I should explicitly note Baars, who varies his level of presence here (& does sometimes involve some words, but often remains low in the texture... including as a sort of distant howling at times), having appeared previously on Lab H Tapes (where he also plays hurdy-gurdy, so evokes a particular folk style, as noted in a March 2020 entry...). So coming back to Cobra, the sense of "waves" there takes on added dimensions, not only via the larger resources of the string trio, but in terms of sophistication & coordination, including by Santos "enriching" the strings in a variety of (usually non-obvious) ways. (And perhaps the best comparison for this sort of "intensifying" contribution is then actually Echoing the Chorus of Life, with Carlos Bechegas, reviewed here in March....) So although the synth/electronics do bring a sense of "extra," a sense of mystery perhaps (never really asserting...), there's also a bracing sense of physicality already from the strings on Cobra, i.e. not so akin to the more Cageian & open textures around Santos on these other albums. (Including via its quasi-classical string context then, LST remains oriented more toward the human-rhetorical musical pole, i.e. neither as depersonalized nor especially naturalistic....)

I haven't heard very much from English "prepared strings" (& homemade instruments in general...) performer Adam Bohman, but enough to be intrigued, including by his second album as part of The Chemical Expansion League, Salute To The Rabid Raspberry: I reviewed this quartet's first album, Grappling with the Orange Porpoise (also from Creative Sources, recorded in 2018), back in July 2020, and then Bohman's prior collaboration with Adrian Northover (in The Bellowing Earwigs), The Perpendicular Giraffe Compartment (recorded in 2015, but not released — by FMR — until '20...), the following month. (Bohman had also released a duo album with vocalist Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg, who appears on the latter quartet album, in 2016 on Confront, Bagpipes And Blackberries.) And then Salute To The Rabid Raspberry features vocalizing, basically Bohman's very British diction in what comes off as a sort of lo-fi or disinterested presentation, sometimes leaving the musical activity to itself, but sometimes rather active, e.g. seemingly reading off lists.... The vibe is thus transformed from the instrumental-only quartet, although the music per se remains similar to that on Grappling with the Orange Porpoise — an album that doesn't exude much foreground (but then the recitations can also seem to eschew foreground...). So the most direct comparison for me is 13 Asperities (released in 2020, but belatedly reviewed here in January 2023...) from Trokaan Project, involving a somewhat larger ensemble (including piano) around recitation of poetry: Mood of the voice can seem similar (while the extended instrumental techniques recall each other...), but also differs substantially in the offering of poetry per se, much more clearly presented sonically, and in foreground diction rather than embedded lower in texture. There's a sort of flatness to the vocal expression around roiling & colorful music in either case.... (The recitations from Bohman can also recall the "impersonal" "stage directions" of e.g. Anthony Braxton's Syntactical Ghost Trance Music....) And I do also wonder (pace e.g. the review of Mars Reveri here from April...) whether Salute To The Rabid Raspberry was "assembled" more recently from materials recorded earlier: There's a clear date of January 2024 given for the mixing, but it's unclear if that applies to the recording itself, which may be from a similar time period (i.e. 2018) as the quartet's previous release. If that's the case, the vocals were added later (& even overlap themselves by the end...). Indeed, I didn't notice until now, but Northover & Bohman released Föhn (with Marcello Magliocchi) in 2021 (similarly vague about recording date versus mixing), and suggestive vocals had already appeared (more tentatively...) there. Northover was also on the "wasp" synth (in addition to sax — & theremin!), as he is for Salute To The Rabid Raspberry. (So although Bohman's "prepared strings" can suggest an electronic vibe, the electronics here are actually from Northover.) And then the quartet is rounded out by Sue Lynch (on sax, clarinet & flute) & Ulf Mengersen (on bowed & prepared double bass), yielding a sort of background scuffling vibe, bent tones, squeaks & pops & flutters, senses of falling, metallic-industrial echoes.... (And Lynch was reviewed here most recently, all during 2021 as it happens & all alongside electronics..., with the Crunch trio, with the Five Shards quintet, also with Northover, and then "tangentially" with NO Moore on Secant, Tangent.... Meanwhile, Mengersen appeared here also most recently in January 2023, with the Offshore Adventures quintet, i.e. bowed strings around Matthias Müller, while performing as well on Xafnikes synantiseis with Ernesto Rodrigues around Floros Floridis, recently noted in another April review....) (Northover most recently appeared with The House On The Hill, from a trio also with Magliocchi, reviewed here in November.... And apparently the two have a new duo album, to appear this month on Empty Birdcage, Time Textures.) There's obviously a sort of whimsy animating many of these titles then, projecting as well a kind of calm through dissonance — ramified now (over a very long album...) by Bohman's dispassionate vocal readings. At some level then, I'm not sure if the resulting figurations are of sanity or of insanity....

Particularly since this summer hasn't been as active here, I want to take an opportunity to note a couple of pending duo releases out of Connecticut. I don't turn to duos often here, as I tend to believe that a third collaborator opens one to the world, but the recently founded (this year) F.I.M. Records is forging a distinctive regional style around aggressive contours & timbral blending. (They might thus be compared with work by Udo Schindler, including his recent duo album on Creative Sources, HerzAtmungen with Olaf Rupp, slowly weaving a collaborative style there, although it's the latter's Entropy Hug trio — alongside two reeds, as reviewed here in May — that comes more specifically to mind in this context, what with its close correspondences & firm statements....) The fact that this is music coming out of the US (versus e.g. other emerging duos on CS...) bears mentioning as well (especially as national creativity seems to be waning...), being as that was an important aspect of my original impetus for this page.... (A little farther afield then, I might contrast the Latin American duo album — for flute with cello — El Espesor del Sueño vol. II, as reviewed here April 2023: That's a potent album too, wilder....) So although I want to highlight the upcoming Dignity: Duos — with Luke Rovinsky (electric guitar) & Caleb Duval (double bass), the founders (in 2020) of the F.I.M. concert series — & Bray / Duval — with the otherwise unknown Kelly Bray on trumpet... — I actually heard the label's first release earlier this year, Hi-Fi Lo-IQ by a trio called Bookers (with Michael LaRocca on drums & percussion): I learned of this — & a previous trio album featuring Duval, Dancing (subtitled "Long Live Harmolodics," recorded in Philadelphia & released in 2022) from Downtown Music Gallery, and indeed there's a nexus between these musicians & other (mostly younger) musicians featured here at various points — e.g. Nathan Corder (per Monopiece + Jaap Blonk) who mixed & mastered all four F.I.M. releases. And the second release had been Blessed from a quartet called Stalwart (also including Rovinsky & Duval), both Blessed & Hi-Fi Lo-IQ involving more in the way of (albeit oblique) genre reference & whimsy (particularly for the latter). So they'd already released trio & quartet albums, whereas Dignity (recorded in Glastonbury this past February) presents the core duo here in a series of intense & substantial (& provocatively named, proceeding without track breaks...) interactions. (Duval is actually credited with electric bass on Dancing, and with close mic'ing, the line between electric & non-electric bass can be unclear here....) There's plenty of blending then in general on Dignity, again close correspondences between the instruments, but with an edge as well. And then Bray's trumpet brings another dimension to the self-titled duo album (recorded in October, also in Connecticut, again with Duval, who's been on every release thus far...), impressive timbral-spectral blending & varied rhythmic correspondences with bass. (Schindler less often plays brass, and then usually cornet, but he's also one of the few to attempt consistently this sort of close-correspondences style in such an intimate setting with string bass against brass.... Although to enter the Jack Wright universe, with which Rovinsky & Duval have a live meeting later this month, perhaps I should mention Greg Kelley on Petrichor, as reviewed here November 2021....) In any case, these duos already seem to take a real step forward (particularly via their tightness & directness...), so I wanted to note them now, even as I'm expecting more from F.I.M....

Shortly after Hour Music (reviewed recently here, in May, but actually recorded later, last year...), Magda Mayas returns with another striking trio release, again reflecting ongoing familiarity (here in a trio dating to 2016, not previously documented...), One Third Of The Sun recorded in Berlin in January 2022 by Thuluth (with Ute Wassermann & Raed Yassin). Of course, vocalist Wassermann has also been a fixture here, e.g. with the intricate molecularity of L'âge de l'oreille (released last year, but recorded later in 2022) — while double bassist Yassin is from the seminal Lebanese "A" Trio, last reviewed here in June 2018 with quintet AAMM. Yassin's bass often provides a deep & mysterious pedal for Thuluth ("one third" in Arabic), pulsing & sliding low tones, but can also buzz high into the texture. Meanwhile, Wassermann's growling (or sometimes trilling or whistling...) can be especially distended, almost dissolving at times, the trio seeming to ride extended & braided waves of continuity through open space: Per the release notes, they promise "commitment to blending timbres and textures, and sustaining them in an almost ritualistic performance while maintaining a dynamic and vivid approach" (which is a good description of the sort of music that I often want to feature here...!), yielding a sort of "process" approach to continuity at times too, especially in the final two (of three) tracks. The longest, opening (& title) track follows more twists & turns though — as e.g. Mayas' Hour Music had evoked a sort of earthy & sometimes rhetorical, quotidian travelogue... — leading into an ultimately spacey, floating landscape. The sense of ritual is indeed palpable, the collective development at times recalling Mayas elsewhere, e.g. with Great Waitress & the classic opening "Rite" on Flock (also seemingly transportive...), but additionally senses of flow developed (collectively) via Filamental, braided-extended lines, becoming noisier with Ritual Mechanics (as reviewed in the same May entry...), i.e. as a larger ensemble. As a trio then, Thuluth retains instead a sense of starkness — via which it might also recall HMZ & e.g. Ize, i.e. "elemental" (distinct) timbral roles in trio around (sometimes gamelan-esque...) piano, but also suggesting there a sort of inhuman naturalism. So does voice humanize One Third Of The Sun? Or does humanity (& human rhetoric) dissolve into a ritualistic, composite wave? Is this then a landscape more of desolation or of empowerment? (One might ask the last question of "outer space" in general.... Until recent, more practical developments, it's largely been a psychological domain anyway.) Beyond the ongoing quasi-Scelsian momentum that develops then, there's also almost an eerie (& delicate, but sometimes more assertive...) world of (spider...) webs lurking, creeping.... Eventually it all just ends though, leaving us wanting more. And despite my deemphasizing piano in this space, Mayas does continue to forge compelling new materials with regularity (i.e. in the personal-timbral domain, often deconstructed, but still sometimes more pianistic-chordal... hybrid diagonals...). As already noted, her long-form articulations & animations radiate through One Third Of The Sun, bolstered in turn by these creative & distinctive texturalists. The result basically forces a continuing reconfiguration of my ideas on "spacey music" — here with an incredible, groundless & floating, sense of flow.... (And since many of the other references in this paragraph are actually to newer recordings, Thuluth may already be ready for more.) Despite the local momentum throughout, time itself might already be said to be variously held in suspension....

Also released at the same time on Al Maslakh (& so paralleling here my double entry around Mayas in May...), Fuchsia Fever — recorded in Berlin in October 2022 — brings together a couple of Lebanese (I guess?) & Brazilian performers as a quartet named "Hic Up." I'd actually reviewed (in September 2020) Marina Cyrino (amplified flute) & Matthias Koole (guitar, electronics) together on Disputa e Guerra no Terreiro de Roça de Casa de Avó (while Koole appeared again with Quem Indica? in July 2022...): That album is more (explicitly) rustic, while Fuchsia Fever brings a more process-industrial feel, burbling & quite electronic for the more sophisticated second-track tapestry (of two), forging an exotic jungle (or even extra-planetary?) landscape. (Such an impression does fit with the group's self-description as a "tropicalist anarchist abstract glitch impro quartet," formed in 2020....) The other half of the quartet is then Tony Elieh (bass, electronics) & JD Zazie (turntable, CDJs): I wasn't familiar with the latter, but Elieh e.g. joined Mazen Kerbaj's Sawt Out trio for their "electric" quartet album Machine Learning (as reviewed here in another double entry last July...). And there's also a strong sense of process at times on Fuchsia Fever — perhaps quasi-nocturnal by the end & then simply ending: Hic Up is tantalizing (if still preliminary, especially at first...), so shall we expect more?

Continuing with some commonalities from previous textural explorations around electronics, e.g. Especially For You (reviewed last September) & Fields (reviewed in March), the new Trails both parallels the title of the latter, i.e. also from Creative Sources (although with no performers in common...), and again features Erhard Hirt (b.1951) in quartet per the former. However, whereas both of those prior releases involved Harri Sjöström, Trails (recorded in Berlin this April) doesn't involve horns, as Hirt (e-guitar, electronics) is joined there by Richard Scott (also on electronics), Klaus Kürvers (double bass) & Willi Kellers (drums & percussion). Electronics were already doubled by Paul Lytton on Especially For You (& before that in fiery "free" quartet Xpact...), while here the "acoustic material" comes from a traditional rhythm team, i.e. some real thump versus the sometimes more ethereal high ranges of Especially For You.... (Although regarding commonalities, do note that a bowed string is found in each of the quartets mentioned here.) To that end, besides appearing here most recently with Offshore Adventures (reviewed January 2023), Kürvers had already released Weiterbauen (recorded in Berlin last October) with Hirt (there also on dobro at times) & Creative Sources regular (especially with "string quartet" Dis/con/sent, as most recently reviewed here with München in December...) Dietrich Petzold (on violin, etc.): Besides the strings, that album — appearing on Acheulian Handaxe earlier this year (i.e. the label that'd released Xpact II already in 2021, before it was released by FMR...), now released (including physical CD) by Creative Sources... — is sometimes acoustic, and especially percussive around pizzicato.... It can also be relatively rambling, paring to a main line at various points (e.g. featuring violin), coming from many odd angles & perhaps even suggesting novelty for the sake of novelty. Trails is then even longer (well over an hour...), generally maintaining a broad & active texture, but also seemingly involving much novelty per se as well: There're various striking sections, such that I feel compelled to note the album, but the overall result is affectively incoherent. In any case, to continue the performer relations, Scott was a regular here for a while, but (alas) hasn't been featured since We Still Have Bodies (reviewed August 2018), while the distinguished Kellers does continue his prolific activity, e.g. here on the striking Conundrum (quintet with piano, reviewed October 2023). Also, I found only one earlier album in common (surprisingly) between Petzold & Kürvers, Hexagon with Ernesto Rodrigues (mentioned here in December 2018). And now for some spontaneous reactions to the mostly sustained four-way activity on Trails, generally undertaken with continuity (& also with little change for track breaks...): Burbling, grinding, growling, sparkling, swelling, chirping, bending, rumbling... invoking a big sense of space & depth (e.g. the echo of bass drums...), busy — as Hirt continues to be an endlessly creative texturalist.

When I wrote a double entry (in May) around Joëlle Léandre — albums Great Star Theater & Live in St. Johann... — I did note the upcoming Lifetime Rebel, 4CDs+DVD, thinking maybe I wouldn't review it separately. The truth is I'm not especially fond of the "box set" approach, but apparently it suits Léandre — & I do continue to review them it seems, including apparently Lifetime Rebel too: Most of the program dates to June 2023 for Léandre's Lifetime Achievement Award at Vision Festival (& it's William Parker this year...), but the third disc (the composition, the largest ensemble, and the longest album...) dates to January 2024 in France. And the included remarks are not unequivocal on this matter, but if I understand, the composition was performed as well that night in June 2023, but due to the compressed preparation time, Léandre wasn't happy with the result. (This situation recalls, to some degree, that with Live at the Ulrichsberger Kaleidophon, as reviewed here October 2013, i.e. with the tentet composition Can you hear me? recorded again later with different musicians, as reviewed here in September 2016....) It's an impressive septet (personnel-wise, that is, called Atlantic Ave., continuing unchanged for this later performance...), but I also didn't get a lot from the composition: There's vocal chattering to start, then some coordinated string figures, giving way to a variety of other combos, eventually extended vocalizing from Léandre & then more crowd chatter.... There's an (Ivesian?) effect of many things happening at once, while we hear only some of them. Maybe it can come to more with experience.... However, the set that really got my attention is that of the opening disc (& I don't know the order from that night...) by Tiger Trio: I'd reviewed their first two albums, Unleashed (February 2017) & Map of Liberation (August 2019), and this is definitely their most inspired recording yet. Unfortunately it's also short, under half an hour (as are discs 2 & 4 here...), but there's some real intensity & flow, strong right from the start.... Despite my (overstated, I'm sure) misgivings surrounding piano in contemporary music, the Tiger Trio configuration of piano (Myra Melford) with bass & flute (Nicole Mitchell) does provide some wonderful textures, and then piano is featured on the next set as well: Léandre had released the trio album hEARoes (in 2023, also on RogueArt) with Mat Maneri & Craig Taborn, but it was kind of disappointing, to be honest. They've got more of a developed sound here though too (now as "Roaring Tree"), dreamy to start, quasi-orchestral, often languid.... It's also good to hear Léandre with these US-based groups, I guess, after various European box sets.... And then the DVD didn't come along with the Bandcamp download, so I haven't seen that.... (DVD downloads don't seem to be a thing.)

And then I still want to make some separate remarks about the final disc, the shortest of the four (called Hughson's Tavern), with Léandre basically accompanying Fred Moten in a poetic spoken word display. As I'd observed around Moten / Lopez / Cleaver (in a December 2022 entry), I enjoy reading Moten. The spoken word is more limited though, and I just don't find something like this to be very musical per se: Whereas e.g. Trokaan Project had projected a sort of "tip of the iceberg" sense of poetic recitation, as if more was happening while the music plays, here the voice fully occupies the foreground much of the time. (I might note as well the recent 29 Birds You Never Heard sextet from Damon Smith, featuring poet K. Curtis Lyle as similar in that the listener feels directly addressed by the speaker, although there're a few interludes on that album too....) This is entirely different from e.g. Salute To The Rabid Raspberry (as reviewed here earlier this month), with its indifferent "background" speaking.... I guess I just don't find being directly addressed via text to be a "musical" experience (or maybe only tangentially...), and frankly, I believe that reviews for this sort of production usually revolve around whether one agrees with the text! (I mean, it's a good text....) So maybe this remark is tedious, or overly negative, but I did want to contrast these sorts of vocal-textual performances.... (Of course, Léandre's usual vocalizing is "musical.") Now maybe I can just skip these items in future — at least until I have some different thoughts.

Geologic Time — per the release info from Fundacja Sluchaj, which also describes the album as "a journey through thriving ecosystems and untouched expanses" & "an auditory exploration of the fragile balance between creation and destruction" — is the second "author album" from US low strings (i.e. double bass & cello, a surprisingly infrequent combination...) player Brad Barrett, following Cowboy Transfiguration. And I really only discussed the latter (his trio, also released on Sluchaj, with Joe Morris & Tyshawn Sorey) in preparation for a more extensive discussion of the first release of Morris's (composed) Instantiation series, Paradoxical (in November 2019): Barrett plays bass in quartet with Morris there, and then appears on the fourth Instantiation (but not the second or third...), Switches, playing cello. The latter is also a trio, adding trombone to the Morris-Barrett duo (exactly as per their 2017 album Value, apparently the latter's debut...), and so the most straightforward comparison for Geologic Time, now with Taylor Ho Bynum on assorted brass. So Ho Bynum joins Sorey as another distinguished musician (e.g. both strongly associated with Anthony Braxton...) to join the Barrett-Morris string backbone for an extended recording session. And as it happens, my last review (in May 2022) here of Morris was alongside Ho Bynum on Geometry of Trees, i.e. the third in a series of quartet albums (starting from Geometry of Caves in 2016...) also featuring cello & voice — such that Geologic Time could almost be this interaction (with Barrett on cello, but sometimes bass...) minus the voice. Except it isn't. I'd already complimented Ho Bynum's use of various accents & background motion for the Geometry... series (especially with & around voice...), and he continues to deepen his methods as a complementary player here, offering e.g. various timbral connectivity & resonances, in addition to more centered-expressive horn activity at other times (including lower in the texture, to good effect...). (And there're unusual horns here as well, i.e. the double cornet & the mini plastic trombone....) The sense of formal momentum (& even smaller scale interplay...) is indeed very different from that of the Geometry... series, particularly around the ongoing Barrett-Morris string duo, but also in the sense of more timbral blending & interpenetration at times: I'd neglected to mention Morris when reviewing F.I.M. & the Dignity duo earlier this month, but he'd already appeared in duo with both Duval (on Thick, 2023) & Rovinsky (on Arcade, 2022), indeed "thickening" his sound a bit via (spectral) intervals.... However, it's his characteristic "note against note" style (of sort of post-bop picking...) that continues to dominate in his duo with Barrett, an intricate & propulsive style that's seemed to characterize so much of Morris's work elsewhere (while corresponding, I suppose, to Versioning from the Instantiation series...), e.g. with Agustí Fernández (& so into the "string quartet" Other Galaxies from 2022, also from Sluchaj, and also with Barrett... & DoYeon Kim, noted here already with duo Macrocosm with Morris, also from the long 2019 discussion introducing Paradoxical...). So there's often a strong sense of line. But it's also braided, e.g. with Barrett, into shapes... where masters such as Sorey & Ho Bynum can then observe or erect new structures. It's this additional perspective, especially via a sense of breath, that brings Geologic Time to another level. And then Barrett has released as well this year (in high def on his Bandcamp page) a couple of other trios with Morris (including or especially on banjo), these also with Jacob Means (from Barrett's "American roots music" trio, with traditional lyrics, The By & By — finally a group without Morris — their second album also released this year, Time Slips Away...) on mandolin etc., Tales of the Celestial West & Pixelated Memory, the latter an electric version with the same trio personnel (& much longer). So there's no recording date given for either of these — while Geologic Time dates to last May in the Boston area... — but they're intriguing albums, following some ideas from Cowboy Transfiguration, i.e. more roots music (including some rather rustic evocations, pace even something such as Brasil's Disputa e Guerra no Terreiro de Roça de Casa de Avó...), involving abstraction, but also an effort to "sit with the presentness of the past and invite a sense of intentional non-resolution." (An earlier Morris trio album that then comes to mind in some ways is Counteract this Turmoil like Trees and Birds, reviewed here October 2016....) And the same might be said of these artsier trios from Barrett, in that they're also lengthy & simply end, maybe without a lot of satisfaction.... There's certainly no climax. And while there's also the sense of endless individual notes back & forth on strings, that basic dynamic becomes much less overwhelming upon exposure: Not only does Geologic Time stretch out in various moments — its slower passages ending up being some of its most evocative, particularly amid senses of rocks & canyons in the open air... — but so had e.g. Pixelated Memory as well, its electric effects (& effects are credited to the string players on Geologic Time as well, with a usage recalling Switches, where "effects" are uncredited...) lending a particular sense of buzzing extension.... A kind of outdoor naturalism thus pervades the lengthy Geologic Time — not so unlike the more industrial hybridity of Traintracks Roadsides Wastelands Debris, and indeed there's a similar sort of three-way vibe (still sort of triangulating Rupp & F.I.M. here too...), notions of human scalings, desolation, ongoing lines.... Whereas Cowboy Transfiguration often remains enigmatic then, Geologic Time can be elegiac instead. It's not only about a "vibe" though, i.e. a sense of (lost?) US Western spaces, but also involves a level of detail, an intricacy to the "nuts & bolts" interaction that itself can actually dominate impressions, senses of landscape (full of subtle or implied activity...) emerging only later (or already there from long prior...). It's also a very long album, exhausting. (Being sick when it came out didn't help my stamina, and the album didn't help me with being sick either! Unlike some....) But over time, I've really come to find Geologic Time to be captivating. I'd kind of forgotten about Barrett from before the pandemic, but it's great that he's back this year (post-doctorate?), and apparently in a big way (i.e. with the four releases noted here...). And there's tremendous expressivity to this trio, in various moments, but it isn't immediately obvious (akin to smoke signals perhaps...), while evocation of geological change looms as well. Yet it's immediately striking too, slapping bass strings to open, intermittent horn wailing (soon alongside Morris's "clean" tone, to be smudged & bent...), soon into senses of space. There's just something about the desolate ecology that calls out, maybe via the relations it imposes.... And so Barrett has forged a strongly American (yet abstract) music, indeed a sort of "avant Western" style (& beyond the novelty of 2019's already distinctive Cowboy Transfiguration...).

And Fundacja Sluchaj Records does continue to release a variety of worthwhile albums: I'd just reviewed two albums with Elisabeth Harnik (pace the Léandre review last week...) in a May entry here, those being from their previous release batch, and now I want to continue with some remarks regarding the quartet Frice, recorded in Los Angeles (in August 2022) around cornetist Bobby Bradford. I'm certainly no expert on the career of the distinguished Bradford (b.1934), and in fact hadn't noted him here previously, but I do appreciate the way this quartet comes together in its four-way interactions, i.e. with Frode Gjerstad (sax & clarinet) & William Roper (tuba) joined by Alex Cline (drums). Indeed I've already enjoyed the sort of old-fashioned "jazz" cacophony that Gjerstad produces (per e.g. Tales From, also from Sluchaj a few years back...), the joyful sense of collaboration & odd angles, boiling over.... And while I wasn't really familiar with Roper (although he's been around LA productions for years...), I also enjoy tuba, and its role here as bass among three horns. Frice can also be kind of "weird" (including some softly spoken lyrics), particularly when spinning out into more of a soloing mode, i.e. involving the usual taking turns, but the four-way textures are still worth noting (& Cline, whom apparently I hadn't mentioned here to this point, does a great job varying his sonorities in support of the three horn masters too...). So the ritualistic sense of building is engaging right from the start.... And then there're still other worthwhile (& rather distinctive...) items from the same batch from Sluchaj, i.e. Ivo Perelman now in trio with Cuban pianist Aruán Ortiz (Ephemeral Shapes), a solo recorder offering (Ecstasy), the debut of Udo Schindler for the label (Ephemeral Locations, with Paul Rogers).... And of course the debut of the iconic Bradford with Frice!

Continuing to develop a distinctive sound world for four cellos, Hunter Underwater has released a second album, Archipelago, recorded in Berlin back in October 2022. This is a much longer album — twice the length & divided into individually named tracks — compared to Hunter Underwater (recorded in 2021 & released in 2022), which I never actually reviewed, but did mention e.g. in the January 2023 review of Offshore Adventures, i.e. from the "similar" quintet for trombone, two cellos, and two double basses around Hui-Chun Lin. That was also a second album (albeit with personnel changes), as coincidentally recalled here in a couple of other reviews this month.... And then Archipelago is much more sophisticated than the relatively more random & rhetorical Hunter Underwater, forging an increasing sense of underwater world, perhaps even coming to recall genres of "whale song" albums.... (And I might also compare its watery evocations to Jon Rose's new Aeolian Tendency, for which he uses self-made instruments to capture the sounds of wind. Archipelago is not so impersonal-passive however, i.e. not capturing the sounds of seas, but evoking them....) So joining Lin, who seems indeed to be cultivating this sound world in general (while also being slower with releases...), is the prolific Guilherme Rodrigues — who brings a more lyrical, quasi-romantic vibe at times... — along with (again) Gábor Hartyáni & Guido Kohn, with whom I'm (still) not otherwise familiar, but who do seem to bring a strong sense of suspension & shifting textural interplay. (There're various harmonics, bouncing string attacks, sorts of hocketing... including passages of smooth extension.) There's also a little story about Buddhist monks to open the album, and the speaking voice for that is uncredited.... The story passes in about a minute though, the music being relatively subdued to start, conjuring a distinctive minimalism at various points as it goes, almost tuneful at times, and with a real sense of repose (while building to some intense moments as well...). As noted, the result is much more coherent than the first album, i.e. leaving aside various tangential notions of "What can four cellos do?" to focus more on the particular sense of underwater scene here. And the impression does linger.

Including per my little Fundacja Sluchaj rundown last week, Udo Schindler continues to release prolifically: Besides that double album with bassist Paul Rogers, adding Eric Zwang Eriksson (drums) to the second half of the second disc (which, unlike most of those to be mentioned here, wasn't recorded consecutively, but rather more than a year later, in December 2023...), Schindler's recent releases involve a number of prominent colleagues, generally oriented around duos. (Zwang Eriksson is the only musician added to form trios for this recent output: A frequent partner of Schindler, but otherwise unknown, I mentioned him here with Canto Senza Parole Allegria in a June 2023 multi-review, i.e. discussing a "trio of trios" around Schindler, including as well the "Low Tone Studies" Dachau Polyphonics & Hybride Synergetics. The latter series is continued now with Rogers on the noted Ephemeral Locations from Sluchaj, involving a sometimes-ecstatic interaction suggestive of "world" styles at times, but also yielding a real "sax trio" vibe later when adding drums....) The recent duo collaborations include pianists as well, and although Schindler has collaborated with pianists in the past (including two albums on Creative Sources with the more minimalistic Masako Ohta, from 2019 & 2020, and already a duo anthology on Confront from 2017...), I hadn't really associated his output with piano (& its fixed pitches). However, e.g. the duo interaction with Swiss pianist Michel Wintsch (of WWW trio) apparently dates back many years, yielding now a lyrical & affective (even tender...) result in Toute L'âme résumée (recorded November 2023 & released by FMR). And then the double album (also on Creative Sources) with pianist Rieko Okuda is even more revelatory, vivid & edgy right from the start: Disturbed Terrains is the duo (& overall title...), recorded in the Munich area this past January, featuring one long track plus a (still exploring...) encore, but then Rummaging in Disturbed Terrain presents a trio (adding Zwang Eriksson) recorded the next night, yielding a particularly dynamic interaction, lines snaking in all directions-dimensions, but also various moments of repose.... (Schindler has released a third session with Okuda on his Bandcamp, also a duo, but with shorter tracks, almost "character pieces" showing distinct textures. That's from a third consecutive date in January — and there's a next day concert with Wintsch there as well....) And although she's not as well known as Schindler's other duo partners here, I'd indeed noted Okuda previously, first on CS, but then with Takatsuki Trio Quartett featuring Silke Eberhard At Kühlspot (from 577 Records, reviewed here September 2021) — an album that I thought could capture some broader attention: Eberhard was in peak form, coming off a prestigious award, while Okuda displayed a particularly protean quality, continual dynamism & versatility (even playing viola on earlier albums...), including command of various traditional piano styles: Her combination here with Schindler is especially scintillating for the trio with drums, suggesting a strong connection throughout (even though the project began as a first meeting...). E.g. the extensive passage around tuba (which seems to have been lost in the credits, but appears in a photo!) for the second track is distinctive, and so is e.g. Schindler's tuba texture to close out HerzAtmungen, his duo album with Olaf Rupp (recorded in June 2023, noted here already in the review of F.I.M. earlier this month, where I'd wanted to compare Schindler's characteristic brass & string combos...). That album with Rupp (also from CS) is also over an hour, slowly building at times, but seemingly a natural combo, so maybe they'll continue... (& perhaps even add a third musician, e.g. a bowed string?). And then there's the release (again from FMR, recorded last July) with guitarist Andreas Willers (again in trio with Zwang Eriksson), Cassiber Complex, a stranger & more exploratory album, guitar basically providing only suspension & swell through the first half.... (Of course, Willers has appeared here prominently with Grid Mesh, most recently with Four, also on CS, reviewed June 2021....) And finally for this particular batch of releases, BASIS acoustronics with Thomas Lehn (recorded last November) is a shorter album released only on Schindler's Bandcamp, more intricate/intimate perhaps than some, but also relatively thin at times & exploratory.... In any case, besides the "obvious" (& suggestive...) collaboration with Rupp, the trio Rummaging in Disturbed Terrain makes the strongest impression here (amid this explosion of creativity from Schindler...): I don't review a lot of horn & piano combos (& Schindler does rely mostly on reeds, despite my brass comments...), but it's a long album that grabs me right from the start (while being the most recently recorded to be mentioned here as well...), remaining engaging & with strong energy. Like many artists, Schindler can seem so restless, always looking for something more or different, but it also seems that things really clicked with Okuda for this sequence. The entire series of releases seems to mark a next step....

In November 2020, I noted the "Earshots" duo of Edward Lucas (trombone) & Daniel Kordik (synth) for their trio album with AMM legend Eddie Prévost, High Laver Reflections (recorded in 2019), but didn't subsequently notice when the Earshots label appeared on Bandcamp. That oversight was corrected around the recent release of duo album End No End from Kordik & Prévost however, and it turns out that Earshots has also been releasing albums with unfamiliar musicians — plus e.g. regular contributors N.O. Moore, Ross Lambert, Ken Ikeda... — & not only when performing alongside one or more of the core duo. So End No End (a release without a recording date, so perhaps dating back to a similar period as High Laver Reflections...) is worthwhile for its shifting industrial tapestry & sense of narrative flow, scraping metals to open, embracing static-stoppages.... Of course, Prévost is very well established (& comes to some relatively uncharacteristic thumping skin drums eventually here...). But I want to highlight a much shorter release, recorded in Stockholm in April 2022, and released last year, the trio album Skins. (And I don't ordinarily review older items that I've missed, but between wanting to highlight the label in general & the fact that these musicians were unknown to me, I felt compelled to add this entry. Plus the recording date is typical of other items being released now....) Skins apparently began from an international duo of Isak Hedtjärn (clarinet) — who was part of the quartet release Festen from Clean Feed in 2016, with better known Swedish improvisers (although not including Mats Gustafsson, who's thanked for this release...) — & Diana Miron (vocals, violin, viola) — who's been a classical performer of Romanian "hyperspectral" music (which specifically announces a phenomenological orientation toward sound...) — to which was added another Romanian, Laurentiu Cotac (double bass). (Miron & Cotac had released the relatively sparser, although building... even seeming sinister at times, duo album Neuma in 2020, as well as e.g. quartet with guitar & electronics, Coop recorded in 2017....) And although under half an hour in length, Skins forges some distinctive & potent textures: Close mic'ing gives the (acoustic?) production an almost "electronics" sound, and then senses of raw power are buoyed by spectral factors as well, i.e. matching overtones & resonances. The result comes to a squeaking & pounding jungle vibe, highly anticipatory in its affective staging, i.e. until voice finally does come more to the fore midway through the second/concluding track, breathy & inarticulate, but eventually to the center of the expression (as much of the thump & racket ebbs...), anticipation seemingly having been consummated, so then winding down.... Prior to that centering though, voice is barely identifiable (although can come to seem as if it was always already there...), with active (even wild...) textures featuring e.g. percussive bounces, escaping resonances, dense evocations yielding quite a din at times, yet still cultivating an original (spectral?) style of collective interactions & aligned resonances....

Infrequent Seams continues a lively release schedule, including with a wide variety of material, both composed & improvisatory, such as the new Meshes of Light, an (undated) improvised quartet outing that might otherwise seem ready for bassist Damon Smith's Balance Point Acoustics label: Joining Smith are ongoing collaborators Alex Cunningham (violin), Lisa Cameron (drums & feedback) & Sandy Ewen (guitar). Indeed Cunningham, Smith & Cameron had already released at least two trio albums together, Dawn Throws its First Knife (recorded in 2020) & Time Without Hours (recorded June 2021). The former seemed particularly capricious & preliminary, and so Cunningham is someone whose style hasn't been easy to circumscribe: Although I didn't review those trios, I'd actually reviewed him already with Specifically The Water (a duo with Claire Rousay, April 2020) & then most recently with Branches Choke (a highly virtuosic quartet, also with Smith, reviewed March 2023). Apparently e.g. the fact of having poetic track titles correlates with Cunningham's participation as well, but his extended violin playing can involve e.g. percussive qualities, slack strings or e.g. high pizzicato, so it's not always clearly distinguishable in the texture, especially here for Meshes of Light. So it might be said that Ewen is simply joining this preexisting trio — except that Ewen has extensive history with both Smith & Cameron herself (although apparently no prior recordings with Cunningham...). The post-punk/no-wave classic Ewen / Smith / Walter was even the original appearance here for both Ewen & Smith — the latter established as an especially prolific contributor now (& specifically as someone to hear with a range of middle American musicians...) — while the former had joined Cameron already for the evocative See Creatures (recorded in 2015, prompting my first mention of Cameron in this space in December 2018...), and then for the extensive double (cassette) album See Creatures Too (reviewed here May 2021). And that reference does end up being quite relevant, as sea life continues to be evoked on Meshes of Light (particularly by the second & third tracks, the pounding opening of the former certainly suggesting a shark, hence also Hunter Underwater & Archipelago, coincidentally reviewed here only last month!). However, while Archipelago does seem a relevant comparison at multiple points, senses of hybridity on Meshes of Light extend well beyond zoomimesis, beyond more fanciful creatures too, and into industrial hybridity, as well as involve broader implications of life (& ecology): The fourth track — & the relatively short opener already recalls other interactions between Ewen & Smith, especially the enigmatic quartet album North of Blanco (first reviewed here May 2014...), substituting extended violin for extended vocals... — suitably titled "Livid Dew" then brings this broader hybridity more to the fore, senses of smoothness suggesting increasingly laminar motion (beyond the choppy sea...), but also wild & jungle-esque (i.e. above the waterline...) ecologies emerging.... Of course, Ewen had already appeared on Infrequent Seams — & has e.g. a couple of solo albums (recorded last year, so more recently) on the increasingly enterprising & varietous Scatter Archive (as introduced here in a multi-review back in August 2022...) too — with the first "K7 Commissions" release, Ekphrastic Discourse (as reviewed here January 2023, recorded June 2021...). Meshes of Light is now No. 19 in that series, these albums (as opposed to others from Infrequent Seams) apparently not being released on streaming services, but rather (along with some others from this entry...) on cassette — & as far as recording date, my best guess is December 2021 (as this quartet appeared together in St. Louis then, per online performance schedules). And then the fifth & final track might be the most melodic (i.e. of a more "human" sort...), "spectral" resonance alignments suggesting a sort of Scelsian, emergent vibe... so taking another step toward some differing textures, arrayed more in overtone layers. Meshes of Light is thus rather ambitious, coming to nearly an hour (& perhaps being relatively experimental at the time, although it does also seem to pull from previous interactions, at least to start...). Pace the previous "violin trio" albums, which are rather more angular (even cutting...), the addition of Ewen seems to allow for the projection of broader tapestries or landscapes then, i.e. feelings of (temporal) extension & of manipulating "sound" as an entity-flux per se. The sense of extension brings some fluidity as well, including via the underwater vibe at times, but more broadly suggesting a sort of (elastic or sloshing...) "swing." Intensities seem to follow vectors of increasing hybridity. (Donna Haraway, cyborg theorist, would surely be proud....) One might even suggest a sort of acceleration — while the poetic titles (chosen by Cunningham?) also throw references back into the human-affective domain, a sense of easing (perhaps) reflected in the musical expression as well. So while Meshes of Light doesn't present a finished product, it does invoke & develop a significant cross-section (or transversal...) of issues relevant to new American music today.

Speaking of Scatter Archive, they continue to release a relatively wide variety of intriguing material, some older, but some entirely contemporary & distinctive. So I managed to miss the Bark! trio to this point, but they date back to the 1990s, and are now releasing a new three-volume series of studio albums on Scatter, Sweet Factory Sessions recorded in July 2023. Volume 1 appeared recently, and features a series of individual "takes" of somewhat different characters, but generally around growling & clattering counterpoint (with quite a bit of parity-equality...), i.e. a "sound"-based approach projecting a sort of collective (hocketing...) forward motion. (They write of "trademark interlocking grooves" but I wouldn't really call this groove: Maybe earlier in their career together....) Some passages can be more mellow (maybe even gloomy?), but the interactions are generally active, featuring novel sonorities in relatively quick articulations. (The opening is quite loud & bright, but moves toward more space & nuance soon....) So, Bark! consists of Rex Casswell (electric guitar) — with whom I wasn't otherwise familiar (but who does have a couple of recent solo releases...) — Phillip Marks (percussion) — actually reviewed here (back in July 2016) with David Birchall & Richard Scott on Auslanders — & Paul Obermayer (electronics) — the newest member of the group (since only 1999...) & also a member of the FURT "electronic processing" duo with Richard Barrett (e.g. per Evan Parker & Warszawa 2019). At times they've had other members & guests, especially including Scott (& Robin Hayward on tuba — which still seems reflected somehow within the trio's sometimes growling textures...), e.g. previously on Scatter with the (likewise 3-volume...) Barkeology! series (released in 2021 but) recorded in the 1990s without Obermayer. (Perhaps it's worth noting at least one similar release on Scatter too, also from 2021, III from the duo behind Earshots, the latter per a review here earlier this month.... Their vibes can be similar, including as high-tech.) Anyway, the Bark! trio might not be so contemporary anymore, but it's still distinctive. And it does involve plenty of sophistication within its own basic style, presumably similarly so for the pending two volumes....

And then I found Økse from a Free Jazz Blog review by Martin Schray, so can't claim to have "discovered" anything, but did want to share a few thoughts of my own: Combining hip hop, particularly vocalists, with free jazz concepts recalls immediately for me Steve Lehman & Sélébéyone, especially their second album Xaybu (reviewed here in a more extended entry, August 2022, exactly two years ago...), a considerable development at the time. And I wouldn't say that Økse is as deep (including in the sense of "layers" from hip hop...) or as transformative as Xaybu is, but it does remarkably often project a similar overall sound. (Perhaps one would simply observe that Økse is more accessible.) And I'm not sure how Økse was produced, as there's a core "free jazz" quartet — Mette Rasmussen (saxophone), Val Jeanty ("sound chemist"), Petter Eldh (bass, sampler, synths) & Savannah Harris (drums) — plus four rap vocalists, with a track for each, interspersed with four instrumental tracks (for a total of eight). But then the recording dates & locations are given as January 2023 in Oslo & October 2023 in Brooklyn: Were different tracks recorded in different locations, or more likely the rappers recorded later? (I suppose this would be an ordinary procedure for hip hop....) There's also plenty of looping, etc. — such that it can be unclear who's doing what. (It's perhaps worth noting as well that Lehman pared his larger Sélébéyone ensemble down to just the two saxophones & drummer, plus their looping devices & of course the two vocalists, for Xaybu. Some of the transformative vibe there must also derive from the explicitly Sufi & Senegalese inputs.... Yet to what degree do "realized" spectralism & hip hop "production" already overlap?) The "sound" of Økse does effectively mix the vibes of free jazz & hip hop though, including the latter's senses of layering & alternation. (And I'd reviewed Rasmussen here first with the duo The Hatch on Dark Tree, October 2019, then with the quartet Hearth & Melt, April 2021.... I was interested in hearing her in "something else" & this is something else.... Then Eldh has been around a while, especially alongside Christian Lillinger, but apparently I hadn't noted him here yet... while Jeanty & Harris have fewer credits, but those do include e.g. with Kris Davis & Peter Evans respectively.) The groovier-rhythmic instrumental ending to Økse almost comes off as traditional (or even folksy) too, i.e. after various "free" jazz & beyond interactions. (And I'm not sure why this is a Norwegian quartet, given that none of the members is from Norway....) Anyway, this seems to be a promising start, and it does seem that Økse intends (or portends) more.

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