Chakrasana, John Butcher, Oxford Improvisers (Scatter Archive)
20 July 2023, Sandy Ewen (Scatter Archive)
Fulcrum, Rachel Musson, John Edwards, N O Moore, Steve Noble (Shrike Records)
It’s not clear why saxophonist John Butcher and the Oxford Improvisers gave the album they’ve just made the name Chakrasana. It’s the name of a yoga asana, and the album cover is a picture of a man performing it. Perhaps it’s because it turns the idea of sitting on all fours on its head the way improvised music can turn all our preconceptions about music on their head. Perhaps they just thought it looked good.
Butcher has been involved in improvised music since the 1980s. He’s worked with most of the usual suspects (AMM, Derek Bailey, SME, Steve Beresford, to name a few). Oxford Improvisers is an ongoing project that’s been around since 2001. They hold weekly sessions open to anyone who wants to go along (see links below for details) along with performances and workshops. They say of themselves, ‘We’re an eclectic bunch. The exposition of free improvisation methods, allows each participant to bring their own tapestry of musical heritage and persuasions to bear. What we all have in common is an enjoyment of creative music making in the moment’.
On this album, ensemble pieces alternate with sax solos by Butcher. Butcher has said of his own playing that it ‘often includes material that exists right on the edge of instrumental stability and control’ and, listening to the two solos here, I think this is what probably enables him to create, for the listener, a sense of intimate involvement in the music, even though he’s the one doing the playing. The central, ensemble track is an engaging wind trio, which has something of a modern classical feel to it, while the first and last tracks (UNDECET 1 and 2) are for the full ensemble, joined by Butcher. Undecet was a new one on me: a piece for eleven players. I should brush up my Latin. The stand-out track for me was the last, with it’s captivating sound-world (I suspect Lawrence Casserley’s intriguing ‘various sounders’ have something to do with it).
Sandy Ewen is an artist, architect and experimental guitarist. Based in Brooklyn, NY, she not only performs solo, but has been involved in a wide range of musical and multi-media collaborations. As she says of her work, ‘When I began playing improvised music, I immediately began experimenting with objects on my guitar… My growing collection of magnets, bolts, rods & chalk stretched out my sonic palate and allowed me to respond to the music instantaneously… With the guitar on my lap, my music and my body are physically linked. My muscles strain, my body shakes, my arms mute or brush the strings – I am connected. My only pedal pans my sound between two amps. A very simple interface between my mind, body, sound and space.’
20 July 2023 is a particularly poignant album. There is a video to go with the music, a study in absence in which the petals of flowers in her late mother’s garden are replaced with the rippling surface of a lake. Ewen lost her mother not long before making it and, as she says in the album notes, ‘absence cannot exist without an imagining of what is missing’.
The music itself is both visceral and pulls no emotional punches. There’s something almost Romantic about it. This is not surprising, given what Ewen has said about her approach. I think, too, there is often, under what seems like a preoccupation with process and method, a strain of Romanticism to be found running through the avant-garde generally. Also, people who haven’t immersed themselves in music based on noise (as opposed to pitch) probably don’t realise just how emotional such music can be. Two minutes in I found myself wondering if there’s some sort of monster lurking under the tranquil surface of the lake that features in the album art. Four minutes in, I realised there almost certainly is: tenacity in the face of loss. Life itself.
A recent issue by Shrike Records, fulcrum is a collaboration between the saxophonist Rachel Musson, bass player John Edwards, guitarist N O Moore and drummer/percussionist Steve Noble. I’m not sure if they’ve played together much as a quartet before, although their previous collaborations makes for a quite elaborate Venn Diagram which I’m not even going to begin to try and draw.
The music is divided into two roughly half-hour sets. There are no album notes to speak of and there doesn’t need to be: the music speaks for itself. What you get comes over as jazz-rooted free improvisation with a sometimes retro feel which I really quite like. Musson’s endlessly inventive sax-playing counterpoints with Edwards’ equally inventive bass, Noble’s percussion weaves a thread through it all, while Moore’s guitar, while sometimes unassuming in a good way, enriching the texture, at others rises assertively to the surface. It can get pretty frenetic, but there are a lot of detailed quiet, slow-paced moments, too. An album of subtlety and energy.
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Dominic Rivron
LINKS
20 July 2023: https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/20-july-2023
Chakrasana: https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/chakrasana
Fulcrum: https://shrikerecords.bandcamp.com/album/fulcrum
Sandy Ewen’s improvisation videos: https://www.sandyewen.com/improvised-music-videos/
Oxford Improvisers: http://www.oxfordimprovisers.com/
John Butcher: https://johnbutcher.org.uk/
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