Clearing Clouds of Confusion, The Neshama Alma Band (Pax Recordings)
Some Uncharted Evening, Beresford / Butcher / Eastley (Scatter Archive)
The San Francisco-based Neshama Alma Band is a collaboration between the composer and guitarist Ernesto Diaz-Infante and the film-maker and flautist, Marjorie Sturm. The name combines the Spanish and the Hebrew words for ‘soul’: ‘alma’ and ‘neshama’ respectively.
There are two tracks on their latest album, Clearing Clouds of Confusion. Both are recordings of live on-air performances. The first, ‘Memphis Sunset’, is a meditation on the gratuitous killing by the Memphis police of the young black man, Tyrone Nichols in 2023. Sturm’s low, sustained flute drones encounter Diaz-Infante’s flailing guitar, all the time drawing it back to a shared point of near-stasis. I’m perhaps over-thinking it, but if it were a painting, it could be that of a grieving mother restraining an angry father, both, in the end seeking mutual support and consolation. This is no mere expression of sympathy: this is about empathy and the real impact death has on those it leaves behind.
The second track, ‘Broadcasting live from YELAMU, on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone territory’, has a hypnotic swing to it. As is explained on the Ramaytush Ohlone website, ‘the Ramaytush (pronounced rah-my-toosh) Ohlone are the original peoples of the San Francisco Peninsula. Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, they numbered approximately 1,500 to 2,000 persons, but by the end the Mission Period only a few families had survived. Today, only one lineage is know to have produced living descendants in the present.’ Again, I found myself thinking visually. Surm’s haunting flute is a persistent presence behind Diaz-Infante’s mantra-like guitar figures. If this music were for a film, it would be ideally suited to a documentary about an ethnically-cleansed people whose ghosts still haunt the land they once lived in. (I found myself wondering, Sturm being a film-maker as well as a musician, if a strong visual element was something she brought to the Neshema Alma project). Like ‘Memphis Sunset’, this is music that reaches out to the humanity of the victims. And it reaches out not only to the Ramaytush Ohlone, but to victims of settler colonialism generally. It is, as the album notes put it, ‘a prayer-mantra for people everywhere to share the land.’ It’s impossible, listening to it, not to think of the situation in Gaza.
Composer Pauline Oliveros pioneered the idea of ‘deep listening’, listening to music in a way which – as she put it – ‘involves going below the surface of what is heard, expanding to the whole field of sound while finding focus. This is the way to connect with the acoustic environment, all that inhabits it, and all that there is.’ You could describe this ‘going below the surface’ of the sound as not unlike attempting to go below the surface of another person’s thoughts and feelings, to seek to empathise with them. It’s a way to approach music which pays dividends when listening to the music of Diaz-Infante and Sturm; and it certainly reflects their approach: going below the surface, where possible, to empathically seek out the inhabitants of the worlds they explore.
Held in the Valais, in Switzerland, the Biennale Son aims to showcase ‘the growing importance of sound in contemporary art’. Some Uncharted Evening, a performance featuring veteran ‘second wave’ improvisers Steve Beresford, John Butcher and Max Eastley, was recorded at the first edition of the festival in 2023.
For half a century, Beresford has been a significant figure in the UK improvised and innovative music scene. As well as his extensive work as an improviser – he’s generally known for working with piano, objects and electronics – he’s written music for film and TV. He’s also written about music and worked as a senior lecturer in music at the University of Westminster.
Like Beresford, sax player Butcher has been involved in improvised music going right back to the days of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. He’s also known as a composer, a creator of multi-tracked pieces and for his explorations of different environments – his album Resonant Spaces was recorded in a number of unusual locations in Scotland and the Orkney Islands. This aspect of what he does is a point of contact with Eastley, whose work, sometimes powered by wind or water, is often rooted in natural settings such as streams and hilltops.
I first encountered Eastley on the 1975 album, New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments, issued via Brian Eno’s Obscure record label. For anyone unfamiliar with his work, he creates sculptures that are also instruments (or instruments that are also sculptures: it depends which way you look at it). He also simply improvises, as he does here, using – among other things – an electroacoustic monochord which evolved from a number of ‘bow sculptures’ he made in the 1970s. As he says: ‘the techniques of playing the instrument are related to quarter and eighth tone instruments such as the sitar, the ear being crucially allied to physical movement of the single string. The pitch is changed in several ways. The body of the instrument can be flexed which lowers the pitch to produce extreme bass sounds at almost zero tension, or using slide techniques, glass rods, fingers or bow the instrument can produce a very wide range of higher pitches. The instrument is electro-acoustic with a magnetic pick-up at one end, consequently the analogue signal can be digitally modelled and transformed.’
Put these three musicians together and what you get is a music that explores – and invites you lose yourself in – the physical qualities of sound. That’s not to suggest that the music is in any way clinical: on the contrary, there’s an intense sense of human agency at work in Butcher and Exley’s sustained duets and Beresford’s thoughtfully-placed piano interventions. I was reminded of Francis Bacon’s description of music in New Atlantis (1627). It’s seriously over-quoted, but I’m going to quote it, nevertheless, as it so vividly describes what’s going on here. This is music made by ‘divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have, together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire.’
What they create is the kind of improvised music with no agenda beyond a concern with what happens next. As a performer, it’s impossible to know what that is until one considers what is happening in any given moment. The rules are written as one goes along and what is about to happen is predicated entirely on what is happening. Certainties are no more than fleeting. As is the way with improvised music at its most successful, one has a sense of revelation: what is revealed is an inkling both of what music is at a deep level and the nature of the human mind; it’s not only uncharted territory but unchartable: all the stuff one can’t put into words or create definitive images of. To borrow what David Toop has said (talking specifically about Steve Beresford in the early days, but it applies to other improvising musicians, too), it’s music that works by ‘throwing out questions and at the same time building a language.’ And it’s possibly a never ending process; it’s interesting to see idiomata emerge, but as it’s an asemic language, one can go on ‘discussing’ it’s syntax and vocabulary for ever. Some Uncharted Evening is the work of three experienced musical conversationalists deeply engaged in a scintillating discussion. It’s an album I’m sure I’ll keep coming back to.
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Dominic Rivron
LINKS
Clearing Clouds of Confusion: https://paxrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/clearing-clouds-of-confusion
Some Uncharted Evening: https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/some-uncharted-evening
Biennale Son: https://en.biennaleson.ch/a-propos
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