O- -O, John Bisset (John Bisset)
Tributaries, Matt Atkins / Chris Hill (Scatter Archive)
Lap-steel player John Bisset’s latest album, O- -O, is a collection of solo improvisations. The sound-world he creates – at times lyrical, at times monumental – is both approachable and enthralling. It is also impossible to label in terms of genre. Not wanting to offload any preconceptions on potential listeners, I’ll resist the temptation to try. He says of the album: ‘when playing on my own each morning, I enjoyed how the tuning of the lap steel was something external I could interact with, … rotating the tuning pegs until I found something which felt good … This set the ground for that day’s improvisations.’ The eight tracks are named after string tunings.
The results are often – two words I don’t use together either frequently or lightly – achingly beautiful. Perhaps I was feeling particularly susceptible when I first listened to it, but I don’t think so. It’s the kind of thing that might have found its way onto Brian Eno’s Obscure label, back in the day. Anyone listening to it that knows those iconic recordings will know what I mean. For example, I’m listening to Track 5, ‘C G G E G B’, as I write, and was reminded – it was a fleeting impression – of Harold Budd’s ‘The Pavilion of Dreams’. And, like Budd, this music has a dream-like quality to it. Perhaps it’s because, as Bisset says in the notes, he was improvising alone in the morning. Early in the day the world of dreams is still reverberating in the mind.
And, by the way, if you find the music of O- -O reverberating in yours, there might want to look out for Bisset’s gigs. He’s getting about this year: in May and June, for example, he’s working his way along the ‘M62 corridor’, doing gigs in Leeds, Bradford, Todmorden and Manchester (details in links below).
Matt Atkins is a sound (and visual) artist who uses percussion, objects, electronics and tape loops in what he does. Chris Hill is an improvising musician who performs regularly as part of the London Improvisers Orchestra. Here, he’s playing ukulele, objects, mouth organs and melodica. Tributaries is a collection of tracks taken from the work they’ve been doing together over the past year. In the album notes they describe their musical ideas as tributaries (hence the album-title): ‘each tributary drifts towards its nebulous resting place, reinscribed and transformed into a whole.’ This playful description certainly captures an important quality of the music which (while not sounding in the least bit like him) pulls off the Erik Satie trick of sounding whimsical while being deadly serious at the same time.
Amid urgent, nervous scrabbling, Atkins’ keyboard scribbles manic lines with the abandon of a Conlon Nancarrow player-piano study. A series of keyboard and reed-instrument chords unfold over a busier, noisier background. What could be the music for a religious ritual turns into the soundtrack to some sort of surreal, dream workshop (complete with train), only to morph again into that of an alien forest… This is a music of transformations which, like the John Bisset – though in a different way – invokes the world of dreams. Our dreams may be solitary and images that haunt them (tributaries, forests, workshops, etc.) different, but through them we discover what we have in common. The decisions an improvising musician makes during a performance as to what to do next are musical ones, based on what is already happening. Like a composer, an improviser crafts musical forms, even if they may be open-ended ones. However, in common with the dreamer, there is an inevitable subconscious element to the way these decisions are made, which helps explain how improvised music, at its best, like this, has a way of sounding rooted in the times of its making.
.
Dominic Rivron
LINKS
O- -O:
https://johnbisset.bandcamp.com/album/o-o-2
Tributaries:
https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/tributaries
John Bisset Events:
https://www.johnbisset.net/events.html
.