Posts Tagged ‘Improvisation’

The Necks – Travel

Posted: 14 February 2023 in Albums
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Northern Spy – 24th February 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The Necks are never dull: an act that can be depended upon to deliver something different, which is no small feat for a band who’ve been going for more than thirty years. Travel sees them revisit the fundamental methodologies of Unfold, released in 2017 on Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ label. Admittedly, it’s not an album I’ve revisited all that many times since I wrote about it, but then, that’s true of many records I’ve appreciated. Some of it’s a time thing, but some of it’s an instrumental / jazz thing. I prefer to engage in the moment – and then the moment passes, and I too move on.

Where this album different from the majority of their others is that the format was integral to the form of the content, as the accompanying blurb points out, proving ‘four sub-20-minute pieces – instead of the typical 60+ minute arc for which the band is known – along with an obfuscated track list which leaves play order to the listener’s hand.’

Travel isn’t quite a straight live improv set, but does, they feel, come closest to recreating the live experience, and was recorded – save for some light overdubs and post- production – primarily live. And it’s very much oriented towards slow grooves and rhythmic repetitions. It’s hazy, mellow, almost sultry.

Side one is occupied by the twenty-one-minute ‘Signal’, built around a repetitive bass cycle and some rolling piano that brings with it a classical element, and, propelled by some busy hand drumming which transports the composition some way from what one would ordinarily expect off jazz-orientated works and into the realms of ‘world’ music (a term I try to avoid, with its connotations of western superiority and self-centredness, but sometimes short-cuts are necessary).

On side two, ‘Forming’, which again stretches languorously past the twenty-minute mark, is led by ripping piano, underpinned by some crunching bass stutters and rumbling groans. It’s jazzy in a psychedelic, Doorsy sort of a way. In this sense, it feels more like an extended mid-song workout than a piece in its own right, but it’s both pleasant and tense at the same time as it builds to a crescendo that never fully materialises.

‘Imprinting’, the album’s shortest cut at just over seventeen minutes, brings the multi-layered percussion to a more prominent position, and clanks and trembles along with almost hesitant-sounding keys and twanging strings drift in and out. It’s also perhaps the most overtly ‘jazz’ piece on the album, although it feels stretched out, the pieces pulled apart and as three instruments drift along together on a steady way, the sensation is quite hypnotic.

Organs always create a sense of grand scale and space, and the heavy drone and trill of ‘Bloodstream’ is utterly mesmerising. The piano is soft and ripples along atop the sustained mid-range drone as ethereal notes drift in and out. Part,

The album feels like a moment in time, somehow transient, and yet also something more. Travel may not really go anywhere, but it very much captures a mood – which is, for the most part, whatever mood you project onto it.

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David Bennet & Vilhelm Bromander – Within Reach of Eventuality

Posted: 28 May 2022 in Albums
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Thanatosis – 7th May 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Within Reach of Eventuality is the debut album by Swedish duo David Bennet & Vilhelm Bromander. Their notes on the album state that ‘Following a semi-open score, the duo is treating elements such as complex textures, non-pitched sounds, microtonality, beatings and intense pauses in an improvisatory and careful manner’.

I’m not entirely sure what that means, and I’m not certain of the meaning of the album’s title, either. It feels like it almost carries a sense of significant import, but then is equally so vague as to be almost abstract. And in a way, it’s representative of the four pieces on the album. There’s a grainy scratching flicker of extraneous noise running along in the background during ‘Part I’, like a waterfall in the distance, while in the foreground, elongated drones – atonal strings or wavering feedback – hover around the pitch of nails down a blackboard. Occasionally, more conventionally ‘orchestral’ sounds – emerge fleetingly – gentle, soberly-paced percussion, string strikes and soft woodwind, and it comes together to create a somewhat ominous atmosphere.

It’s a hushed, minimal ambience that fades out towards more sonorous drones that ebb and flow across ‘Part II’, and as the album progresses, the interplay between the tones – and indeed, atones – becomes more pronounced, and also more dissonant and consequently more challenging, as long, quivering, quavering drones rub against one another.

The structures – such as they are – become increasingly fragmented, stopping and starting, weaving and pausing. There is a sense of a certain musical intuition between the players, the rests coming at distances that have a sense of co-ordination, if only as much to confound expectation as to sit comfortably within it. In other words, Within Reach of Eventuality feels like a semi-organised chaos, and as it slowly slides towards the conclusion of the sixteen-minute fourth part, the sound thickens, the volume increases, and the atmosphere intensifies, become more uncomfortable in the process. And in this time, the meaning becomes clearer when it comes to understanding their approaching the sonic elements in a ‘careful manner’. There’s nothing remotely rushed about Within Reach of Eventuality. The notes are given space and separation, room to breathe. It all feels very considered, very restrained: it’s no improv free-for-all, there are no frenzied climaxes or blasting crescendos. Instead, they demonstrate a sharp focus on a fairly limited range of sounds and spaces, and the result is an album that has a strong cohesion.

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Will Glaser – Climbing In Circles pt.4

Posted: 21 April 2022 in Albums
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Limited Noise – 29th April 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

With a CV that lists near-multitudinous membership and participation in bands (notably his regular gigs with Snack Family and World Sanguine report, but also contributing to Sly ands the Family Drone and countless others), renowned experimentally-minded jazz drummer and percussionist Will Glaser has taken some time out to continue his solo album sequence with the fourth instalment of Climbing in Circles.

Over the course of three previous releases, Glaser has explored jazz, folk, and beyond, through an experimental prism and with a methodology that’s very much about improvisation. This outing features long-time collaborator, Matthew Herd, on saxophones and piano, alongside trumpeter, electronic artist and producer, Alex Bonney, and was assembled over the course of five day. While the album is loosely constructed around two overarching ‘acts’, they consist of eleven separate and distinct pieces, and bookended by ‘Beginnings’ and ‘Endings’, there’s a narrative arc of sorts, here.

It begins with crawing birds and a gentle piano playing what one could readily describe as a charming melody with a quite conventional structure, and ends with a genuinely pleasant lilting piano tune – and yes, I mean tune in that it has all the conventional features of one.

In between, there is slow decay and infinite space. Rumbling, echoes, notes reverberate off one another at distance. Sax and trumpet trill and drone, sometimes at one, at others as if duelling. The percussion rolls and crashes, but more often than not, at distance, and creating texture and atmosphere and colouring the pieces with expression rather than maintaining rhythm.

The combination of instruments is relatively conventional in jazz, and, similarly, there’s nothing particularly radical about the way they’re played and interact on here. But there’s considerable joy to be had in simply listening to the musicianship and the way the musicians themselves interplay on the pieces. ‘Spiral Dance’ is a hypnotic serpentine spin, while ‘Bad Dream Machines’ is a drifting mass of fragmentation, dissonant, discordant, and above all, a work that exists in the spaces between the notes and in the reverb and echoes as in the notes themselves.

There will be some – perhaps many – who are deterred by the very mention of jazz, and there is a perception of there being a certain elitism about jazz – the idea that random notes and borderline unlistenable chaos is somehow a superior art form, and anyone who doesn’t ‘get’ it is clearly a philistine. But Glaser is a remarkably positive showcase for jazz, with a focus on the listener rather than purely the musicianship. Climbing in Circles Pt 4 is about atmosphere, about vibe, rather than indulgent wanking: this is jazz you don’t need to be an aficionado to appreciate. It’s listenable, and it’s varied, too.

On ‘Dead Fly Disco’, he and his collaborators play completely straight, a song with structure and swing, something you could even dance to, or at least nod a long to its toe-tapping groove in a basement bar late at night. ‘Ballad in the Jazz Style’ almost feels like they’re playing with and working within the tropes as an example of discipline, and it’s highly restrained and wonderfully moody in that sad, smoky jazz melancholy way.

There’s plenty going on, and enough to maintain interest, but not so much as to be chaotic or to lose the listener. Whether these things make it a good access point to jazz, it’s hard to say, but what it does mean is that Climbing In Circles pt.4 is a jazz album that’s accessible and enjoyable simply as a musical work.

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JAMAICA!! MEETS SLY & THE FAMILY DRONE – Celebrating The End Together In The Good Time Swamp

Posted: 14 August 2021 in Albums
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27th August 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Who would have thought in the middle of March 2020, we would be living in such different – and fucked-up – times a full sixteen months later? Many of us who work in offices left thinking we’d be back in a few weeks, and surely no-one predicted the decimation of so much retail and hospitality. While the most unprecedented thing about the pandemic in the UK was the overuse of the word unprecedented, it is true that this is the first time in history that the healthy have been quarantined en masse alongside the sick and the vulnerable.

In many respects, the vulnerable have been the hidden sufferers and forgotten people during this time. As the band write, ‘People with learning disabilities in England are eight times more likely to die from Covid than the general population, according to research that highlights a “hidden calamity” of the coronavirus crisis. At a time where arts centres are critically underfunded, and the disabled community will be the last to come out of lockdown, we want to offer solidarity and support to our artists and friends.’

The communal and collaborative element of Sly’s work is integral to their ethos: anyone who’s seen them live is as likely to have been implicated in the set as simply spectated, with the band among the audience, the audience becoming part of the band and banging drums… and this is no corny, manufactured communal clap, a contrivance to mask government bullshit, this is a real in-the-moment collectivism that’s life-affirming and enriches the soul. Their music may be murky and weird, but Sly and the Family Drone very much do use music for the power of good. And so of all the bands who would perform at the ICA with Jamaica!!, they were always the most likely candidates. Jamaica!! is less a band than a group musical session operating out of The Gate, an arts centre for adults with learning disabilities located in Shepherds Bush, London. The Gate write, ‘out of efforts to make the music sessions we facilitate there as inclusive as possible which we found by necessity entailed abandoning notions of what makes sense musically; an extension of the central ethos at the gate of reshaping the round hole to allow the square peg to fit rather than the unfair expectations of the inverse’. Their sessions are entirely improvised, and the band is whoever turns up on the night.

Jamaica!! Meets Sly and the Family Drone is a document of this particular night, and it’s being released as a special art edition with the aim of raising money for The Gate. It’s clear from the two expended workouts that occupy a side each of this c46 cassette that the two units readily come together as one in their improvisational stylings

Side one of Celebrating The End Together In The Good Time Swamp is an immense exploratory piece: twenty-one minutes of wild, percussion-heavy, industrial jazz noise. What, that’s not a thing? Yes, yes it is: it’s precisely Sly & The Family Drone’s thing, and the joy of their live work is that the only thing you can predict is that will be percussion-heavy industrial jazz noise.

It begins quiet and atmospheric, picked notes ringing out over a misty murk, drones and croaks of horns groan and yawn like a slumbering beast in dream, perhaps on the brink of awakening… You feel you should tread carefully. But clattering percussion swells unevenly, and there’s a building tension as well as a building volume. It sounds ominous.

And then, off-key notes ring from every whichway. Is it free jazz or is it simply chaos? Perhaps it’s both. Rising up momentarily, a big-band swinging beat that dives some kind of shape and spine to the seemingly formless sonic mass that’s swirling all around.

Ten minutes in, there are some indecipherable vocals shouting, while whizzes and whooshes enter the mix and it’s like a space rock rendition of a Throbbing Gristle performance. And then it gets really fucking drummy. It’s a full-on barrage, a solid wall of percussion. The final few minutes are truly cathartic, as the pace picks up and we hear the sound of ALL THE DRUMS. EVER. ALL AT ONCE. It’s beyond thunderous – it’s positively volcanic.

Side two is, in many respects, more of the same, only it’s slower, denser, more undulating, dronier. It’s a swirling, seething mass of sound, a glorious twenty-three minutes of mayhem, a surging hammering on of drums and drums and drums and drums, battering out a loping march while horns, kitchen sink and cement mixer churn out a heavy grind of weighty discord. There’s a lull around the mid-point, where it delves into an almost shuffling beat, and there’s even a brief paise while there’s some kind of bass break. Then the rhythm shifts again, and things are almost funky for a while – but mostly, it’s noisy and drummy. I mean, this lot are drummier than Boredoms, and they actually lock into a mean groove near the end. As the track powers onwards to its climax, the energy radiates from the speakers and it makes you feel good – because music really is always the best therapy.

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Neuschlafen – What we do

Posted: 10 April 2019 in Albums
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Wonkystuff

What do Neuschlafen do? The York / Leeds collective which features member of myriad other bands and projects seem to exist more in the ether and in theory than as a tangible entity, despite the existence of a handful of recordings, most of which capture live improvisations in collaboration with other artists.

It’s been some time since the trio, comprising John Tuffen (guitar, synthesiser, vocals), Ash Sagar (bass, percussion, synthesiser, vocals) and Jason Wilson (drums, percussion, synthesiser) combined forces to release anything ‘proper’, although What We Do – a rehearsal room recording committee to (virtual) tape on a Tascam DR07-mkII (with no overdubs) at House Of Mook, Leeds on March 24th, 2019 adheres to their improvised, zero-budget, DIY ethos to the letter. Some of the sound is a little muffled and muddy, and the balance isn’t quite what studio ix would aim for, but it does capture the band’s essence and approach a vast expanse, before

With the exception of the twenty-five second ‘Breath #1’ the eight pieces here are all long-form explorations that sit toward the ten-minute mark. The first, ‘The Set-Up’ could be a literal rendition of its title and is more f a soundcheck than a song, with a wild crash and slash of cymbal mayhem and frenetic jazz percussion over a gloopy, strolling bass.

‘A Slow Hand’, with its wandering, repetitive motifs, has echoes of latter-day Earth and conjures a spaced-out-desert rock / folk hybrid played under sedation. It meanders along, before the playing becomes quieter, and it finally sort of peters out. And yet it doesn’t feel remotely disappointing, because it sounds somehow intentional.

The tracks tend to follow a similar flow in fundamental terms: the drums plod along with frequent and explosive, unpredictable fills punctuating the rhythmic line while the bass wanders around casually while returning to its root motif by way of an anchor just when things start to look like the structure is losing shape and the guitar lays down layers of abstraction and textured atmospherics rather than affecting any semblance of melody or tune.

The title track is a definite standout: landing at around the albums mid-point, it steps up the tempo and goes straight into a chunky jazz-tinged krautrock groove. It’s the rhythm section that dominates, while synths waft and ripple and heavily echoed guitar rings out crisp and clean but at a distance. And whereas the other pieces tend to drift, ‘What We Do’ drives and maintain a linear, forward-facing trajectory as it builds through successive slow-burning crescendos.

It’s the percussion that comes to the fore on the closing tryptic, with the 15-minute ‘Divisions’ constructed around a relentless rhythm around which pulsating synths grind and drone in way that calls to mind Suicide’s debut. Somewhere, maybe about halfway through, when the drums have hit an optimal thump and the cymbals are crashing all over, the bass boosts into an approximation of Joy Division’s ‘Isolation’, while monotone vocals, the words inaudible, drone away in the background as the instrumentation stretches out into a vast expanse, before the final cut, ‘to the end’ breaks loose with a thunderous clatter of freeform percussion and sprightly bass that bounds around freely and fluidly to conclude a set that’s simultaneously tense and mellow, an amalgamation of so many disparate elements that renders it difficult to place. And that’s all the more reason to rate this effort, that broadly sits in the brackets of avant-garde, experimental, jazz, and even post-rock and math-rock, albeit at their most minimal and most deconstructed. And that is what they do.

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Neuschlafen – What we do

Sly & the Family Drone – Live at Cafe Oto

Posted: 1 June 2018 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

The missive which contains a link to the album lays out the facts. ‘August 2015: On a sweltering summer evening, Sly & the Family Drone brought their sweat-soaked carnival of chaos to east London. This is a recording of that night.’

Café Oto seems to be the venue of choice for weirdy, avant-garde experimental acts to capture their live sound – or perhaps it’s one of the few venues that truly embraces all that it weirdy, avant-garde and experimental in the first place. This, of course, is one of the benefits of operating on a not-for-profit basis. Art takes precedence over capital. It’s also an intimate space, where even a small crowd will make the place feel like it’s heaving, and it’s possible to really feel that connection between performer and audience in an up-close setting. Truly, here’s no substitute for being able to smell the sweat and see the whites of a perfomer’s eyes

Sly and the Family Drone have been pushing the parameters of messy noise for about eight years now, and while their recoded output explores all areas of murkiness and abrasion, their live shows are something else. Chaotic and cathartic, the only predictable part is percussion – that is to say, a lot of percussion.

This particular outing is heavy, and percussion-heavy from the outset. Thick, low-end blasts thunder through pounding drums. The percussion intensifies in both power and pace, while the droning bass frequencies bottom out to a place below the pelvic region while explosions of top-end squeal painfully. Less than ten minutes in, and they’ve hit total overload. Over the course of the album’s hour-long duration, they maintain it, and if anything, continue to push further, harder, louder, harsher. Crescendo hits after crescendo, and cumulatively, it’s punishing – in the best possible way.

It’s not just a hell of a noise: it’s all the noise. Even when the noise abates and the relentless battery of snare halts temporarily, eardrum-perforating feedback and whirring, hissing shards of treble fill the space. Through speakers, it hurts. Once can only imagine the impact and potential damage inflicted on those actually present. This is less a case of ‘you probably had to be there’ and more about ‘damn, I wish I’d been there’.

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Jerman / Salis / Sanna – Kio Ge

Posted: 3 October 2017 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

The facts:

Jeph Jerman: snare drum, frame drum, cymbal, pumice, e-bow with metal, wok lid, old brass bowl and ball bearing, disintegrating paint brush ​
Giacomo Salis: percussion, objects, field recordings ​

Paolo Sanna: percussion, waterphone, prepared zither, thingamagoop2, s.w.radio ​

So, not just any paintbrush: Jeph Jerman’s instrument of choice is a disintegrating paintbrush. The list of instrumentation deployed in the production of Kio Ge is nothing if not improvisational, and this is in keeping with the spirit of the album’s twelve improvised fragments.

There’s nothing fully realised in an explicit sense here, but that’s not what Kio Ge is about. These pieces – they’re not strictly compositions in that they’re not pre-ordained, but by the same token, composition can take place in real-time, spontaneously – but it may be more appropriate to refer to them as musical happenings or sonic events.

While many of the tracks sit in the three to four-minute bracket, a number are barely a couple of minutes in duration, but what they offer in a holistic sense is a series of sketches which clatter and clank, bubble and scrape, transitioning through simple, sparse arrangements to dense, multitextural works.

These aren’t pieces which resonate on any particular level, and they don’t move the mind, the soul or the body with their abstract firms and absence of rhythm. But that does not mean that Kio Ge lacks engagement: in fact, Kio Ge engages at precisely the points the attention begins to wander.

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Jerman Salis Sanna – Kio Ge

Pan-Scan Ensemble – Air and Light and Time and Space

Posted: 5 August 2017 in Albums
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Hispid Records / PNL Records

Christopher Nosnibor

Another one lifted from the epic and eternal backlog, Pan-Scan Ensemble’s Air and Light and Time and Space is a document of the first live improvisation by this Scandinavian collective centred around the ever-active free jazz drumming luminary Paal Nilssen-Love. Perhaps as one would predict, the nine players, with two drummers, three trumpets, a piano, a whole slew of saxophones and a flute, contrive to create quite a dizzying racket.

There are just two pieces on the album: ‘Air and Light’ and ‘Time and Space’. The former is a punchy twelve minutes in duration, and after a calm beginning, with just sporadic clatters of soft percussion to punctuate the aural vista, all free jazz hell breaks loose around five minutes in. Discordant piano and wild brass fly in all directions simultaneously, different keys and time signatures clash. It’s not music that will help soothe a headache, that’s for certain.

On ‘Time and Space’, things begin in a calmer place, and the incidental rolls and rumbles are slow but jarring. It all seems quite restrained. However, by the six-minute mark, it’s a frenzied mayhem of horns and arrhythmic drums crashing and…. It’s a dizzying cacophony, and after a while, when they finally bring things back down a couple of notches, it’s quite a relief.

The second extended crescendo is slower, more deliberate, weightier, but no less dramatic. Finally, some twenty-five minutes in, something recognisable as a tune emerges. Dolorous piano rolls over a steady, insistent beat. The horns still run wild all over the place, but they’re held in check by the solid rhythm. It builds and builds to an immense climax.

I know that this type of free jazz improv is supposed to be ‘difficult’, and some works are more difficult than others. In the main – and this is purely my personal taste rather than a comment on its musical or artistic merit – I find it all too much. Air and Light and Time and Space is a bewildering tumult of chaos, busy, uncoordinated and in some respects wilfully unmusical. None of those things are bad in themselves, but I struggle to grasp the purpose beyond self-entertainment for the musicians in the room. Apart from the last seven minutes or so, when a certain sense of structure coalesces from out of the chaos, it’s not fun. Nevertheless, the passion of the players is unmistakable, and the way they do bounce off one another to evolve the ebbs and flows and monstrous crescendos is impressive.

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Damo Suzuki & Sound Carriers – Live at Marie-Antoinette

Posted: 26 April 2017 in Albums
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Play Loud! Productions – PL063LP

Christopher Nosnibor

Mark E Smith is not Damo Suzuki. Only Damo Suzuki is Damo Suzuki. Damo Suzuki requires no introduction, of course. However, his vast and almost immeasurably influential output seems to exist almost in the ether, his own name and that of CAN being names to conjure with, but perhaps carrying more connotations than actual connection.

Suzuki’ status as an innovator and a one-off requires no comment, either. The fact he’s been going for multiple eternities, and continues to perform sets that are completely off the wall means his reputation remains unharmed, and this release – one more addition to already impressive body of work which essentially stands to define Krautrock – won’t dent that.

As the title suggests, this set was recorded live at Marie-Antoinette, Berlin, Germany, on 24th November 2011. Damo Suzuki was joined on stage by a stellar lineup, consisting of Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM, Angel) on electric baritone guitar and effects; Ilpo Väisänen (Pan Sonic, Angel) on electronics and effects; Michael Beckett (kptmichigan, Super Reverb) on electric guitar and effects; Claas Großzeit (Saal-C) on drums and percussion, and Tomoko Nakasato (Mio, JINN) on dance and electric rake. No, I have no idea what an electric rake is, but on vinyl, each of the album’s half-hour tracks occupies a side of the two-disc set.

Ordinarily, live releases take the best cuts, or the single best night of a tour. Dirk Dresselhaus’ comments which accompany the release suggest that this recording doesn’t necessarily follow that rule, and instead presents an honest account of a singular event: “I find it fairly difficult to say something about how the music in this concert came about, cause we didn’t plan or rehearse anything and hardly were able to hear each other on stage. Wherever it came from, the energy and course of this concert is very much based on group dynamics and an almost telepathic sort of communication, like a swarm of fish. When I mixed the sound later on in the studio I discovered a lot of weird things on the separate tracks: for example Kptmichigan’s guitar signal is changing level for about +/-30 dB once in a while which is a lot and was probably caused by a broken microphone cable. Luckily the fucked up parts made the sound even heavier and more distorted instead of destroying it,” he says.

At times the lack of planning and rehearsal is apparent, but in the main, Live at Marie-Antoinette captures a collective who are capable of a rare musical intuitiveness. And whatever it may have sounded like on stage, and regardless of the occasional stab of feedback and errant extraneous intrusion, the recording captures a tense, atmospheric musical soundscape which transitions across the various parts with a creeping stealth.

To draw attention to any one passage would be to entirely misrepresent the overall arc of the performance. From the tribal chants to the undulating synth-like tones to the slow-building crescendos and the sustained sonic blitzkriegs which absolutely tear through the curtains of sonic decency, each and every aspect of the set is integral to the overall experience, which is built around a series of ebbs and flows, often rising from next to nothing to a whorling tempest quite unexpectedly. And it’s true that the colossal peaks are accentuated by the shuddering volume and crackling distortion they produce. Sometimes, fucked up is good.

This is all part and parcel of the live medium: while the studio affords total control over every aspect of every element of the sound, when playing live, anything can happen. The real test of a band’s capabilities is how they deal with the unexpected eventualities and how they deliver the show to a crowd under adverse circumstances. There is no audience sound on Live at Marie-Antoinette, which means it’s impossible to gauge the audience reaction to the show. But the sound balance suggests the audience were subjected to a punishingly loud and challenging set. It’s probably one of those rare live albums where the recording is more pleasurable than the actual event.

http://playloud.org/archiveandstore/trailers/damosuzuki/trailercode.html

 

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