Lower Marsh, John Butcher, Pat Thomas, Angharad Davies, Mark Sanders
Ni Vu Ni Connu (Bandcamp)
Unlockings, John Butcher, Pat Thomas, Angharad Davies, Mark Sanders
Ni Vu Ni Connu (Bandcamp)
The Glass Changes Shape, Chris Corsano, John Butcher, Florian Stoffner
John Butcher (Bandcamp)
Eight Duos, Burkhard Beins, various artists
Ni Vu Ni Connu (Bandcamp)
London-based saxophonist John Butcher, who turned seventy this year, has been involved in all kinds of improvised collaborations 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).
Lower Marsh is a collection of duets, Butcher being the common factor in all of them. The first is with Pat Thomas (electronics), the second and third with bassist John Edwards. The fourth is with violinist Angharad Davies and the fifth with percussionist Mark Sanders.
Butcher is a player with a wide expressive range. The secret of this is probably his tendency to understatement which, wisely, always leaves him with space for the music to expand into. He tends, too, to avoid stereotyped expectations – gestures which one might expect to be brash, for example, are at least as likely to be articulated softly, with attention to detail. And it’s always interesting to hear performers adapt to the company they’re in, in this case, anything from Thomas’ abstract electronics (Butcher’s chord-playing blending into Thomas’ ring-modulations) to Davies’ spacious glissandi.
Anyone interested in the music of Lower Marsh ought to check out Unlockings. This features the same line up, only this time playing as a quartet. Although they’re not sold as such, having listened to them both, I tend to think of them as a double album. As one would expect from the duet album, playing as a quartet, these four create a rich, diverse sound-world, as engaging in their more spacious textures (for example, in the second track, Unlockings II) as they are in their more action-packed jams.
The Glass Changes Shape features Butcher again, only this time playing with the guitarist Florian Stoffner and drummer Chris Corsano. There’s a real sense of common purpose at work here. This is Butcher’s approach – creating space though understatement, as described above – reproduced in triplicate. As jazz-writer Brian Morton put it, ‘These three artists don’t need volume … Their message is inscribed in elegant lower-case and rarely used aural fonts.’ That this quality is a deliberate stylistic choice and not just an end-result is suggested by the title of the first track: all three players demonstrate ‘The Necessary Temperament’. That’s not to say there’s anything sparse or minimal about what’s going on here. On the contrary, it’s full of movement and rich in ideas, with a discrete touch of gentle humour – something one picks up from the track titles (‘Disaster Laugh’, ‘Terminal Buzz’) even before one plays the music. Even at its most frenetic, there’s always room for subtlety.
Eight Duos, like Lower Marsh, is a collection of duets featuring one common performer, only, in this case, it’s German percussionist Burkhard Beins. Percussionist doesn’t begin to cover it: Beins is as at home with analog synths and bass guitars – in fact, anything that makes a noise – as he is with conventional percussion.
The first duet features Andrea Neumann, a prominent member of the German Echtzeitmusik (‘real-time music’) scene. I say scene, rather than genre, as it’s a difficult thing to define. Echtzeitmusik has been linked to Reductionism – an approach to improvisation typified by subdued, unstable sounds, the creative use of silence and a renunciation of gesture – but any attempt to pin it down tends to flounder. As a scene, it possibly has more to do with the social network of musicians and listeners involved in it as it has to any particular approach to free-form music-making. Neumann herself started life as a classically-trained pianist. Her interest in piano preparation led her to have a strung frame specially made (the ‘inside piano’) which she plays in conjunction with a mixing desk.
The second is with Michael Renkel. A guitarist, he – like Neumann – is classically-trained. Also, not unlike Neumann, he plays a string-board, only one that he made himself. He also uses preparations and real-time electronic processing. Here, though, the resources are modest and both players are only credited with playing percussion and (somewhat enigmatically) ‘strings’.
The third, with pianist Quentin Tolimieri, is perhaps the most conventional-sounding: a substantial part of it being rooted in the language of modern jazz. The fourth, with Andrea Ermke, couldn’t be more different: it’s entirely noise-based, using synths, minidisks and samples. As Beins says in the album notes, ‘on a conceptual level, the idea was that I would play with different instruments or with a different set-up each time in order to present the breadth of my current work’. The duet-partners were chosen with this in mind. Each session demanded a different methodology. The next duet, with pianist Anaïs Tuerlinkx, is different again, in places being very reminiscent of Cage’s works for prepared piano. The sixth features trumpet-player Axel Dörner. In the seventh, Beins – here, on electric bass and electronics – is joined by electric bass player Tony Eliah. This, the longest of the duets, unfolds as a series of static textures. The final duet, with Marta Zapparoli, sounded intriguing, featuring, as it does, ‘antennas, receivers, tape machines … analog synthesizers, walkie talkies, samples’. It did not disappoint. It’s quite a noise-fest.
Stylistically diverse, this album, paradoxically, defines a style, though not in the sense people usually talk about it. The style here has little to do with how the music sounds: it’s about process, not end result. And the process is that of collaboration, the process of finding common ground with another performer. You could compare it to speakers of different languages evolving a pidgin language which allows them to communicate. This is music as the process of human interaction. I haven’t heard (although it has happened), but, after all that, I’d be interested to hear Beins duetting with John Butcher.* To go back to the first of these albums, as Butcher says in his album notes, ‘I’m still always slightly amazed how individual approaches interact and entwine in a collaborative improvisation’.
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Dominic Rivron
LINKS
Lower Marsh:
https://nivuniconnu.bandcamp.com/album/lower-marsh
Unlockings:
https://nivuniconnu.bandcamp.com/album/unlockings
The Glass Changes Shape:
https://johnbutcher1.bandcamp.com/album/the-glass-changes-shape
Eight Duos:
https://nivuniconnu.bandcamp.com/album/eight-duos
*Beins and Butcher have played together as a duet, although the most easily available collaboration between them was a trio with Mark Wastell from back in 2014:
https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/shop/burkhard-beins-john-butcher-mark-wastell-membrane/