TORU Volume 33 featuring John Bisset, TORU / John Bisset (Toru)
TORU Volume 34 featuring Greg Sterland, TORU / Greg Sterland (Toru)
An Irish Almanac of Noise and Experimental Music From 2025, various artists (Nyahh Records)
Llift #17, LLIFT (Recordiau Dukes)
TORU brings together the three trumpet players Sam Eastmond, Celeste Cantor-Stevens and Andy Watts. Sam Eastmond has been involved in a number of projects over the years, including working closely with the US musician John Zorn. As well as being a trumpet player, Celeste Cantor-Stevens is also a writer and interdisciplinary artist. Her website tells us that ‘much of her work focuses on human displacement, migration and borders, education, (in)equality, and social change, and on the place of music within this.’ Originally from New Zealand, London-based Andy Watts performs with the London Afrobeat Collective. On top of everything else they do, they’ve found time, since 2018, to put out almost five albums a year as TORU.
I can’t immediately think of anything quite like it. If being a free improv trumpet trio wasn’t enough to earn them a place in the annals of uniqueness, every TORU album also features a guest musician. TORU 33 and 34 both came out last November and featured lap-steel player John Bisset and saxophonist Greg Sterland respectively.
TORU 33 has a deep, mellow quality to it. The music here makes the most of the lyrical qualities of the trumpet (and the cornet) and the rich, resonant qualities of John Bisset’s lap steel. Anyone who (if they’re still reading!) usually finds improvised music a turn-off should check out ‘The Gift Shop at the Anarchist Revolution’. They’ll probably be pleasantly surprised – the music more than makes up for the lack of actual merch.
TORU 34 is a moodier, edgier affair – just as good, but in a different way. Not that it doesn’t have its mellow moments: check out, for example, the track ‘A Pleasant Open Face’. It might sound strange, but listening to it straight after 33, I was acutely aware how, here, all four musicians are controlling most of what they do with their mouths: they can – and do – respond to the way they shape the sounds with the spontaneity of spoken conversation. And, as with spoken conversation, as I’ve often remarked in the past, it’s always interesting in improvised music to see how the presence of a new face in a group changes what the other members say and how they say it.
Where to start with the latest release from Nyahh Records ( An Irish Almanac of Noise and Experimental Music From 2025)? One could write a book about it. Over thirty artists are featured, all of whom probably deserve a plug. I’d like to devote a whole column to it, but I’m still catching up after the (very welcome) Christmas break.
Listening to Fergus Kelly’s ‘Strange Attractor’ took me back a few decades, to listening to John Peel late at night. If I’d heard it back then I would’ve been feverishly glancing at my cassette recorder, hoping it hadn’t run out of tape! Talking of which, Danny McCarthy’s ‘TAPEHEAD (Begin Anywhere)’, the longest track on the album, manages to holds one’s attention, even with its minimal material and very slow rate of change. Declan Synnott’s ‘Facility’, an electronic piece, conjured up literary associations for me – in this case, JG Ballard. I liked the (intentional?) pun in the title: the music invokes the spectre of some impersonal ‘facility’ while – to pick up on the other meaning of the word – using materials that are easy to combine effectively. Synnott, though, goes beyond the obvious, and creates an engaging piece, not only in terms of the sounds it uses, but of it’s use of the stereo space, too. The same can be said of David Lacey’s ‘Two Spools’. Dennis McNulty’s ‘ those gates were always open’ also invoked – intentionally or not – a literary reference, in this case, Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem, ‘On a Raised Beach’:
The inward gates of a bird are always open.
It does not know how to shut them.
That is the secret of its song,
But whether any man’s are ajar is doubtful.
Perhaps it’s just me, but the music could even be a backdrop to the poem. Viola player Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh’s ‘Snow Learning’ (pre-composed or improvised? I’m not sure which) captures the essence of snow, its uncanny uniformity and the way life carries on, slowly, beneath it. I’m guessing the title of cellist Eimear Reidy’s ‘Fledgeling Flight Feathers’, refers to that sense you can get, when improvising, that every time you jump off a high place into musical space, it feels like the first. Of course, on one level, one learns how to proceed, but, on another, one has to surprise both oneself and the listener. On that level, it’s as if you have to relearn how to use your wings every time. David Donohoe’s ‘Maybe Infra’ is a mixture of tonal simplicity and engaging collage. James King and Caroline Murphy are performance artists who began working together in clowning and cabaret. Their performance here, ‘Sanction’, a brass and string duet featuring vocalisations, is well worth a listen, as is sculptor and sound artist Karl Burke’s ‘Cage on a Stage’.
These are just some of the tracks that jumped out at me on first listening to the album. If I have a pet gripe with regard to some music labelled ‘experimental’, it’s when people use the genre simply as a way to invoke the weird or gothic. Fortunately, for me, there’s not a lot of that here. I say ‘for me’, as it’s just a personal thing: there are lots of people out there who love those kind of fictional and filmic associations. For me, though, experimental music is an opportunity to open the mind to discover and invoke new or, at least, less familiar responses to music. To go back to the MacDiarmid poem, it’s about opening gates we perhaps never even realised were there. And, with thirty-two tracks to choose from, there are plenty of gates to try here.
Llift #17, like the TORU albums, is the latest in a series, this time from the Llift community improvised music project in North Wales. They regularly upload albums of recordings made at their meetings. I like the way they occasionally incorporate fragments of text here, although I couldn’t find any mention of where they came from. Improvised story telling, perhaps? If so, great. Why not? Near the beginning of the third part – in what, for me, writing this, was a bit of weird synchronicity – we get the gates again: ‘At every door he shouted out his name but no-one opened. But when he realised they were waiting for someone and who this someone was he managed to transform his face at which point he made his entry taking the place of one … who never arrived.’ Things don’t work out though, so he heads for the woods, where he finds ‘a simple gate with no lock’. I suppose its hardly surprising to keep finding gates and doors which serve as metaphors for entry points into alternative musically-generated realities.
#17, in my opinion, has to be one of the best Llift albums yet. Between them, the players create a rich sound-world that really keeps you listening. One minute you’re in deep space, the next, at the heart of some surreal, industrial process, and then, when you least expect it, the shawm come at you out of nowhere.
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Dominic Rivron
LINKS:
TORU Volume 33 featuring John Bisset: https://torutrumpets.bandcamp.com/album/toru-volume-33-featuring-john-bisset
TORU Volume 34 featuring Greg Sterland: https://torutrumpets.bandcamp.com/album/toru-volume-34-featuring-greg-sterland
An Irish Almanac of Noise and Experimental Music From 2025: https://nyahhrecords.bandcamp.com/album/an-irish-almanac-of-noise-and-experimental-music-from-2025
Llift #17: https://recordiaudukes.bandcamp.com/album/llift-17
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