London 1993, The Recedents (Scatter Archive)
The Recedents were one of the longest-running free improvisation groups in Britain (the other being AMM). Mike Cooper, Lol Coxhill and Roger Turner worked together as a trio for almost thirty years, finally shutting up shop in 2010. Coxhill and Turner had their roots in more conventional jazz/improvisation backgrounds but Cooper’s, unusually, were in acoustic blues. They were primarily an electro-acoustic group (though in the album notes, Turner, who initially used an EMS Synthi-A, said, of giving up that machine, ‘truthfully, did the Recedents ever need more electronica?’). According to Coxhill, the group owed its name to the fact that all three of them were bald.
On this album, Coxhill supplements his soprano saxophone playing with a Casio SK-1 (a lo-fi sampling keyboard), and Waisvisz crackle box (see links, below). In addition to his drum kit and assorted junk, Turner can be heard using a radio, a jaw harp and the aforementioned EMS Synthi. Cooper, as well as his electric lap steel guitar, uses a Roland Bassline, a Korg drum machine and, like Coxhill, a Casio SK-1. Cooper says of the Korg, ‘sometimes I inadvertently hit the “play” button and it leapt into some pre-programmed Latin rhythm,’ a comment which underlines what he talks of as the ‘versatility and humour’ of Recedents performances and the fun they had playing together.
The album perhaps ought to carry a warning: if you’re not familiar with the work of The Recedents, you’ve probably never heard anything quite like it before. There are eight tracks in all. From the outset, you realise how the programmable devices can, at any moment, impose a mechanical pulse on the music that the performers have to go with or work against. Turner’s human drum-machine can inject fearsome momentum into the music, too (as he says in the album notes, ‘the acoustic drums had to find a space to deliver or suffer the consequences’). It can lurch from moments of stasis to manic activity, a sense of purposeful busy-ness – only no-one (quite rightly) ever telling you quite what the purpose is. At moments, it can be like being in an arcade cram-packed with absurd electronic slot-machines, then Cooper’s lap steel starts almost crooning over the top of it all, sending (or, at least, trying to send) the music off in a different direction. Sometimes it feels like the musical equivalent of a fairground white-knuckle ride. One minute you want to laugh, the next you’re staring into the abyss.
It’s an album full of surprises. At the start of track four, it’s as if we’re in a 1970s TV thriller series, but only for a moment. Before you know it, the music veers off in a more abstract direction. The next track begins with an unadulterated Coxhill sax solo, which unwinds over a series of sustained electronic chords, before morphing into something more noise-based. It’s perhaps the most conventional moment on the album.
A 5 CD set of The Recedents’ music was released in 2014, Wishing You Were Here, which brought together the best of their performances over the years. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy to get hold of these days. People used to (do they still?) debate the validity of recording improvised music at all: it was certainly a big issue for some back in the 1960s and 70s. I think it’s pretty clear now how important it is to do so. There is now an important body of work by improvising musicians going back decades. Now remastered by Olaf Rupp, London 1993 is an important release by Scatter Archive, as it helps keep the work of The Recedents available not only to its fans but to a potential audience who don’t know what they’re missing.
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Dominic Rivron
LINKS
London 1993: https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/london-1993
Mike Cooper’s website: https://www.cooparia.com/
Roger Turner’s website: https://www.turners-site.com/
An appreciation of Lol Coxhill (1932-2012) by David Toop:
https://davidtoopblog.com/2012/07/10/end-of-play-for-lol-coxhill/
Cracklebox demo: https://youtu.be/EO96lK0Fvx4?si=qcqMr-iB0jcvJ_NB
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