QUAQUA [1982], TIGER MILK with John Russell (Scatter Archive)
Antila, Sophie Agnel / Mark Sanders (Shrike Records)
In the early 1980s, improvising guitarist John Russell and trumpeter Chris Burn founded the improvised music club Mopomoso. Originally based at the Red Rose in Finsbury Park, it moved to the Vortex jazz club in 2008, when the former was converted into a pool hall. It remains the UK’s longest-running regular improvised music concert series. (It depends when you’re reading this, but you still might have time to catch the Average Dragoons, among others, this Sunday afternoon (19/10/25)). Fete Quaqua, founded by Russell and a spin-off of Mopomoso, was an annual festival of improvised music.
QUAQUA [1982], one of the latest releases from Scatter Archive, was recorded at the Charteris Neighbourhood Centre in Islington as part of Fete Quaqua that year. It features music from two concerts in which Russell himself is performing with and alongside the members of Tiger Milk, an all-woman improvisation trio that got together after the 1982 Women Live! London Musicians Collective concert series (see link, below). Featuring Annemarie Roelofs on trombone, Josefina Cupido on drums and Sue Ferrar on violin, they split up over forty years ago, but have recently got together again and are touring Britain. Scatter Archive plans to release more of their work over the course of this month. They’re due to play at St Mary’s Church, Stoke Newington on 28th October.
There’s over two hours music here, which is quite a lot to take in! Ferrer and Roelof between them navigate an improvisational stream of consciousness that draws gestures from classical, folk and even – I thought at one point – klesmer. Cupido’s percussion is endlessly responsive, a kind of glue that holds it all together, although it’s equally at home setting the creative agenda (as in the latter parts of Track 8). When you listen to Russell, you can see why he opted for the acoustic rather than electric guitar: the noises you can make with the former are visceral and immediate, whereas the sound of an electric is mediated by the electronics and often noise elements – distortion, for example – are electronically generated. He makes wide-ranging creative use of all the the sound properties of the acoustic, from the noisiest of attacks to clean, lyrical melodic fragments. And his use of harmonics is quite special.
There’s a lot of rich, full-on creativity from all four musicians. Track 8 (‘quartet 2’) is quite something, I thought. And the same can be said of the trios, the last four tracks on the album, with their dense, driving energy and epiphanic, melodic moments, in which Roelofs exchanges trombone for violin for some of the time and joins Ferrer and Russell. QUAQUA [1982] is a very special album, one I’ll be going back to again and again.
Sophie Agnel was born in Paris, although, as music journalist and sax-player Guillaume Tarche put it, ‘it is towards other sounding islands in the heart of a reinvented temporality that she dwells today, at the stern of a grand piano, an instrument that she turns into a real living & vibrating organism.’ Having trained as a classical musician, she moved into playing modern jazz and, from that, into free improvisation. Influenced as she is by John Cage’s prepared piano techniques, she has a deep interest in extending the possibilities of the piano.
Drummer and percussionist Mark Sanders, a veteran of Derek Bailey’s Company, has worked with a wide range of musicians over the years, including John Zorn, Paul Dunmall, the New York International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and both the Scottish and Sydney Symphony Orchestras.
In April this year, Agnel and Sanders got together to record and perform in front of an invited audience at the Sansom Studios in Birmingham. The end result is the album, Antila. Antila – Latin for ‘pump’ – is the name of a constellation visible from the southern hemisphere. It’s just south of Hydra. The brightest star, Macondo (HD93083), gives its name to the fifth track. Other tracks, apart from the eponymous track, are named after colours – those of the stars in the constellation, I’m guessing. (Interestingly, although it doesn’t seem to figure here, Antila contains a distant spiral galaxy, NGC 2997). It made me wonder if, somewhere out there, there were alien improvising musicians who’d named an album track – or some other cultural artefact way beyond our comprehension – after a constellation that includes our sun.
There are five tracks in all. It might just be the association set up by the choice of names, but, to me, they all have a feeling of the night sky about them. Repeated percussive strikes feel less like invitations to dance and more like the ticking of pulsars. This is spacious music, in which, much of the time, noise and pitched notes coexist, the pitch of the notes used merely as tone qualities, but which sometimes coalesces into almost-conventional musical shapes on the piano, music with occasional overtones of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes and even Charles Ives at his more experimental. Perhaps I’m overthinking it, but these semi-conventional intrusions might even be taken to mirror our similarly fleeting presence out there, or ‘Wow!’ signals from distant others. The track ‘Orange’ begins with dry, dessicated sounds, one layer of which coalesces into an ostinato figure, a musical landscape into which the sudden intrusion of an isolated piano note sounds quite alien – ‘like finding an ashtray on Mars,’ as I think Stockhausen once said of the use of a human voice in an electronic piece.
To us, visually, the night sky seems to be a largely static phenomenon. However, being named (rather oddly) after a pump, Antila – the constellation – suggests flow. It’s a good choice of constellation, as this contradiction reflects what’s going on here: music, on account of its very nature, has to exist in time, to flow, in order to exist and yet, as here, it can play tricks with time, suggesting stasis, the illusion of space between things, vastness. We can’t yet book flights on interstellar ships to distant star-systems, but, in the meantime, we can set our dishes to track Antila and tune in: it’s well worth a listen.
,
Dominic Rivron
LINKS
QUAQUA [1982]: https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/quaqua-1982
Antila: https://shrikerecords.bandcamp.com/album/antlia
Women Live! 1982 programme: https://womensliberationmusicarchive.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/women-live-1982-london-musicians-collective-programme.pdf
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