Prophet Marginals, Arthur Bull, John Oswald, Scott Thompson
Scatter Archive (Bandcamp)
wirksam, Axel Dörner, Niklas Fite
Niklas Fite (Bandcamp)
this is a tree, Kay Grant, Ian McLachlan, Daniel Thompson
Empty Birdcage Records (Bandcamp)
Prophet Maginals brings together composer and trombonist Scott Thompson, poet and improvising guitarist Arthur Bull and the sax-playing artist and dancer John Oswald. There’s very little in Thompson’s album notes about the actual music: I guess he prefers to let it speak for itself. He does describe, though, how their activity as a trio, over the last couple of decades, has been limited by geographical considerations. Despite these, they’ve kept the project afloat. One gets the feeling that it represents, for them, a musical comfort zone. As Scott Thompson puts it, they’re ‘three guys who, after all these years and kilometres, are very much in the same place.’
This release, from Scatter Archive, documents a studio session they held in Montreal, late in 2023. The six tracks are named after hours of the day: they could be the times they were recorded or a whimsical addition, there’s no way to tell. Either way, they protect the music – in this case, rightly – from any preconceptions we might bring to it.
Improvised music, when it dispenses with all the other conventional agreements that hold music together, usually relies on the intuitive connections between the musicians. (There are exceptions: musicians might decide to pursue their own paths simultaneously. You’re free to develop your own ways of working: that’s why they call it ‘free’ improvisation). Here, the listener senses these connections. It’s as much about the conversation, the lines of communication, as it is about the sounds. The playing here is attentive and responsive to a fault. It’s easy to see what Thompson means about the understanding between them.
wirksam features Swedish guitarist Niklas Fite (here, playing banjo as well) and German trumpeter Axel Dörner (who doubles on electronics). Searching for a translation of the title, I discovered there are various possibilities in English: valid, efficient, potent, active, effectual. I decided it was probably one of those words for which there is no one direct equivalent.
There are two tracks. The first, ‘haftbar’, translates as ‘responsible’. Initial tentative forays into silence morph into an intense, fluid discussion. Later, the music implodes back into silence, leaving Fite and Dörner to pick up the threads again, which they do. It’s interesting that Fite has opted to use a banjo alongside his guitar. If you’ve improvised on a particular instrument yourself, it’s intriguing to hear what other people do with it. I know I’ve enjoyed a love-hate relationship with the banjo: as soon as you start playing it, its distinctive sound demands to be improvised with, but what you constantly find yourself fighting against is the short decay. That’s my experience, anyway. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing: indeed, it can be a fruitful source of creative tension. Of course, you can’t know what’s going through someone else’s mind as they’re playing, but I couldn’t help feeling Niklas Fite might be on a similar journey.
In the second track, slow sections for guitar and trumpet, the guitar tending towards Webern-like harmonies, alternate with more dense music, involving the electronics, often taking live sounds and scrambling, scrunching and reversing them. The title,’haltlos’, translates as ‘unstable’. Thinking about this, it struck me how, in a way, all music can be thought of as ‘unstable’. If it weren’t, there would be no need to keep going; you can think of what you’re playing as being constantly on the verge of collapse and what you do next as what’s needed to prevent it: a kind of sonic reverse-Jenga. It might end with some kind of resolution, but, of course, it doesn’t have to.
So, is wirksam wirksam? I’d say so. However, having listened, it struck me as quite austere. I wondered if this was a subjective reaction until I reflected on the titles, with their emphasis on efficiency, responsibility and stability. There again, I wasn’t sure how seriously to take them. Is there a hint of irony going on here, I wondered? Perhaps there’s a deliberate ambiguity. If you take them a face value, they could describe the task of an improvising musician, who might see themselves as responsible for effectively maintaining the stability of the musical structure as it unfolds. There is a lot of creative communication going on, but, listening this album, you could say the emphasis is on the exploration of language, rather than (like Prophet Marginals and Fite’s previous album, insisting) on the conversation. This is not a criticism: one of the great things about free improvised music is its potential to be so many things. Anything is possible. As I said earlier, that’s why they call it free. insisting, by the way, is also available on Fite’s Bandcamp site. Like wirksam, it’s well worth a listen!
this is a tree is something else again. It’s a collaboration between the singer Kay Grant, trombonist Ian McLachlan and guitarist Daniel Thompson. (I say Ian Thompson is a trombonist, but multi-instrumentalist would be more accurate: he’s been a fixture on the free improvisation scene since 1970, playing, at various times, drums, sax and euphonium). If you wanted to pigeon-hole it, you’d probably call it jazz-influenced (wordless vocalisation can’t help but invoke this), but, to be honest, it doesn’t come across as music that feels a need to identify itself. The tracks are all named after trees. The music has a warm, intimate feel to it (a quality enhanced by the way the album’s recorded), which will come as a surprise to anyone who’s had a close encounter with the spikes on a blackthorn (the title of Track 3)! Not that the music can’t be spiky, as evidenced by the busy, restless passages in the fourth track, ‘willow’. On first listening, this was probably my favourite. On second listening, I realised this was merely because by the time I’d reached it, I felt tuned in to these musicians and their way of doing things: it’s an album with many high-points.
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Dominic Rivron
LINKS
Prophet Marginals: https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/prophet-marginals
wirksam: https://niklasfite.bandcamp.com/album/wirksam
this is a tree: https://emptybirdcagerecords.bandcamp.com/album/this-is-a-tree
Interview with Kay Grant: https://britishmusiccollection.org.uk/article/interview-kay-grant