Volume 1, PER-SON-ELL (Scatter Archive)
Meshes of the Evening, Angharad Davies / Burkhard Beins (Ni Vu Ni Connu)
DUOS, Martin Hackett / Keisuke Matsui (Scatter Archive)
PER-SON-ELL was a project developed by guitarist Rex Caswell, reed player Sture Ericson and player of bits, bobs and electronics, Martin Klapper. Sadly, having worked together through most of the noughties, the group drifted apart, but as Caswell says in his album notes, ‘the interaction between the three of us was special and quite unique’, Their work together ‘inspired me to create a whole new area of sounds and techniques which I used later in my solo playing – something I am very thankful for.’ He also says that, although they toured the UK and played in Scandanavia, they spent more time making music behind closed doors than before an audience. This was an interesting point to make, I thought. As a musician one is always one’s own audience and, as a trio, one always has an audience of at least three. Some musics positively exploit this (Elizabethan madrigals, for instance) whereas others can reduce the musician almost to a dogsbody (as is this case with some orchestral music). Improvised music – one of its great strengths – is an example of the former. Of course, it’s great to have an audience who turn up simply to listen, but some of the most interesting – and rewarding to make – improvised music, I’m sure, has gone unheard by anyone apart from the people making it (unless you count neighbours and house-mates).
And, listening to the recordings here (recorded in Copenhagen, in 2008), it’s immediately obvious that the three musicians involved put a lot of work into forging a common sense of direction. It’s sometimes difficult to tell which one is making which sound: this is due not only to the extended techniques used by Ericson and Caswell and the wide range of sounds used by Klapper, but also to the almost telepathic sense of common purpose they project.
Volume 1 is the first of a series of three archive recordings of PER-SON-ELL’s work to be released by Scatter Archive. I look forward to the next two.
Meshes of the Evening brings together – enmeshes even – Angharad Davies’ violin and the percussion of Burkhard Beins. What I’ve just been saying about PER-SON-ELL applies here too: Beins and Davies often create a more ‘slow-release’ music, in which ideas develop over larger time-scales than is the case with Volume 1, but it’s no less intense for that and shares a similar sense of common purpose.
Beins’ website is prefaced with a quote from Piranesi: “Every ass can tell the best is always located in between monotony and confusion. The only problem is, where is the center?” and you get the feeling, listening to the music, that what he and Davies are involved in here is an ongoing quest to find that sweet spot. What they discover is an unlikely-sound world in which the sounds of a violin and percussion can forge similar musical shapes. And they’re both prepared to set off in whatever direction the other leads them, at one moment dramatic and changing, the next, mantra-like. There are surprises aplenty: in Meshes 2, for example, the music veers off into a passage that could almost have been composed by Bartók.
Martin Hackett is a member of the London Improvisers Orchestra, Oxford Improvisers and the Muzzix collective in Lille, France. He plays various instruments but has developed the KORG MS-10 synth – the instrument he plays here – into, as the album notes that go with DUOS put it, ‘a unique and distinctive voice.’ Keisuke Matsui plays regularly with Eddie Prévost’s workshop group and, like Hackett, is a member of the LIO.
This is the sort of music that begins not with the emotional or psychological patterns the players might impose on it, but with the sounds themselves. The challenge for Matsui’s guitar and cello is to expand on and develop the sound-world created by Hackett’s MS-10 and vice versa. It’s a way of working which produces a music that’s full of surprises. People often use ‘experimental’ simply to describe a genre, using it, paradoxically, as a way of signalling to the listener what they might expect. The music of DUOS, however (like all three albums I’m talking about here, come to think of it), is experimental in the best sense: what we hear is the end of a process being worked out by two musicians who are listening to each other intently, in order to shape the sounds they’re making together, almost becoming the sound itself. Anything could happen. Expect the unexpected.
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Dominic Rivron
LINKS
Volume 1: https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/volume-1
Meshes of the Evening: https://nivuniconnu.bandcamp.com/album/meshes-of-the-evening
DUOS: https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/duos
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