Move Fast And Mend Things – 201CD (2025), Hi Res Heart (Discus Music)
Cave Printmaker – 9014DL (2025), Walt Shaw (Discus Music)
12 Short Pieces for Denis ApIvor, Ash Cooke (Ash Cooke)
Going Along, Dominic Lash / Emil Karlsen (Scatter Archive)
For Move Fast And Mend Things, their second album, Hi Res Heart have expanded from a trio to a quintet (if you don’t know their eponymous first album, Hi Res Heart, check it out – it’s also on Discus). The outfit started life as a trio with roots in the music of Chicago in the 1970s. As their sax player Martin Archer said of their first album, he feels most at home when he plays ‘this music – which for convenience I will call AACM Music, as it is directly inspired by the masters of the 70s black American avant-garde’ and ‘when I proposed this trio it was intentional to create an instrumentation which closely matched that of the classic Leo Smith Trio of the 1970s – a line-up which allows space and fire to co-exist.’
There’s plenty of space and fire in Move Fast And Mend Things. Not only that, but the inspired expansion of the group to include two string players makes for an exciting sound-world and lends an interesting depth to the music, too. There are too many highlights to mention. It may have its roots in the music of 70s Chicago, but it’s superfluous to know this: Hi Res Heart transcend them to create a music of their own that is very much of the 2020s. I could say more, but don’t want to colour the preconceptions of anyone listening for the first time. I could listen to this music all day.
Walt Shaw began his musical life back in the 1960s as a drummer playing rock and jazz. As time went on, his musical horizons broadened and he began to incorporate home-made instruments, found objects and electronics into his music-making. He has performed widely with other improvising musicians, in both the UK and Europe. He is also a visual artist. I say ‘also’, but these two sides to his creativity very much blur together: his visual art tends to look like his music and his music, to sound like his art. I know this is a subjective assessment on my part, but I think if you check out his artwork as well as listen to the album, you’ll probably get what I mean. It’s a connection Shaw acknowledges: as he puts it in the album notes, ‘I view my visual and sound creativity as very similar, originating from the same element of consciousness.’
Cave Printmaker is a conscious development of this connection. There are fifteen tracks in all and Shaw conceived them as ‘soundscapes … as if some of my paintings were converted to sound, rather like synaesthesia.’ The results are fluid and lyrical – not adjectives you often use in relation to artists whose work centres around percussion. Of course it’s subjective, but listening, I constantly found myself wanting to see what I was listening to, as the music is indeed ‘visual’ in a way that is hard to describe. The fact that Shaw comes at the music from two less-than-conventional directions – a visual artist’s sense of form and an expanded sound palette – makes for music that’s uncannily original and which could find an audience well beyond the confines of genre. It’s a very special album.
Ash Cooke’s latest solo album, 12 Short Pieces For Denis ApIvor, takes as it’s starting point a guitar piece by the welsh composer. ApIvor, one of the many sadly sidelined UK composers of the decades following the Second World War, wrote many pieces for the classical guitar. The particular piece Cooke has in mind here is Saena. As well as writing five symphonies, five ballets and three operas, ApIvor found time to translate the complete poetical works of Lorca and the title of this piece (‘arrow’, in English) references Madrugrada, a poem in which arrows fired by blind archers represent the painful and unpredictable nature of human desires. It was written in the early 1970s, by which time ApIvor had moved on from the strict use of serialism to a more free atonal style which, though atonal, was based more on consonance than dissonance. The mood is reminiscent of Lorca’s poem.
A similar mood and harmonic language serve as a starting point for Cooke’s improvised pieces, although he does develop them in directions of his own, sometimes erring in the direction of tonality and consonance even more than ApIvor. This is music that embraces space, that – though created within carefully controlled limits – is open to any gesture that feels right at the time, and which never takes refuge in arbitrary complexity. Not only is it a fitting homage to ApIvor’s music, but it also, by taking ApIvor as it’s starting point, develops an engrossing sound-world for both the player and the listener to explore.
Cooke is also part of the North Wales Llift community improvised music project. They upload albums of recordings made at their regular meetings. They’ve just released Llift #15. I’ve flagged up their albums several times in the past, so I won’t write at length about this one, only to say check it out and keep an eye out for their regular releases. You can find a link to it below.
Dominic Lash’s notes for the album Going Along begin with some common sense observations on the way we define music in terms of genre which I totally concur with. I must say, when writing about music I rarely give genre a second thought. Indeed, if I do, it sets off a clamour of found metal objects in my head: it means I’m probably no longer really listening to or thinking about the music for what it is. Having said that, I find myself questioning it: genres and allusions to genres do carry associations with them and no musical performance can exist in isolation from other musical performances or, indeed, from the world it takes place in. I guess the thing is to let the music and any associations it brings with it do their work and not overthink it. I like the observation Lash credits to John Butcher, too, that ‘the distinction between an influence and something one likes is not at all clear.’ It’s a thought that I’m sure will resonate with anyone involved in creative work.
As for the music, there are four tracks here, all involving Lash playing electric guitar alongside Emil Karlsen on drums. Listening, I can see how Lash came to ruminate on the whole business of genre and influences. I read a short story once (by M John Harrison – see links, below) about a prisoner trying to escape from his cell by making a hole in the wall. When he gets through it, he finds himself in a space, with another wall beyond it. He proceeds to make a hole in that wall, finds himself in another space, and so on. He will never reach the outside. Indeed, that’s not the point. If you make music with a drum kit and a distorted electric guitar all the allusions to jazz and rock Lash writes about are pretty sure to kick in. Even if you try, there is no hope of escape: moreover, the sounds of previous escape attempts have become part of the genre-specific sound-worlds one is trying to escape from. As with Harrison’s prisoner, the joy – for both the performers and the listeners – is in the attempt. What else can I say about it? After what I’ve been saying, I guess I better not overthink it. Let’s say, if it were a gig and not an album, I’d be really pleased I’d gone along to it, even if it had involved a long walk on a cold, wet night.
Dominic Rivron
LINKS
Move Fast And Mend Things: https://discusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/move-fast-and-mend-things-201cd-2025
Cave Printmaker – 9014DL (2025): https://discusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/cave-printmaker-9014dl-2025
12 Short Pieces for Denis ApIvor: https://ashcookemusic.bandcamp.com/album/12-short-pieces-for-denis-apivor
Going Along: https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/going-along
Llift #15: https://recordiaudukes.bandcamp.com/album/llift-15
The Walls by M John Harrison: https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/the-walls/
Denis ApIvor: https://www.musicweb-international.com/routh/tradition.htm#apivor
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