LASH/SINTON/WARD, Dominic Lash, Josh Sinton, Alex Ward
Scatter Archive (Bandcamp)
Hazard Calls, Alex Ward, Dominic Lash, Mark Sanders
Shrike Records (Bandcamp)
Adjacent Planes, David Hopewell, Ash Cooke
Recordiau Dukes (Bandcamp)
First, I should declare an interest. The recent Scatter Archive release, LASH/SINTON/WARD, rings all sorts of bells for me. The combination of double bass, baritone sax and clarinet took me straight back to the days of my youth.
There were three of us. Myself on bass, Paul on clarinet and Ben on baritone sax. We were all in our mid-teens and still at school. I think it was Ben’s idea to start with. What prompted him to suggest it, I’m not sure. Anyway, the three of us, for a while, met up regularly to play free improvised music. What was so exciting was that we hadn’t been listening to other free-form musicians – we just did what we felt like and made it up as we went along. The results were some of the most intense, memorable musical experiences I’ve ever had. One memory in particular stands out, from early on: we were all deeply involved in a fast, frenetic, full-on improvisation when, all of a sudden, we ended together. There had been no eye contact or visual cues: we simply knew we’d reached the end. In the silence which followed, we looked round at each other and laughed, marvelling at how it could happen. We were learning that groups (of musicians, but not just musicians) function together at a deep, unconscious level.
There was a sense that what we were doing was transgressive: making up music with no dots on the page, no time or key signature. It was in the days of well-funded summer residential courses for young musicians. I remember, on one such course, the three of us walking down the corridor. I remember Ben glancing at me and muttering furtively out of the corner of his mouth, ‘fancy doing some… avant-garde?’ at the same time jerking his head towards the door of a practice room. With no more ado, we all headed straight for it. Sod Fingal’s Cave. It was as if he’d suggested we all go off and smoke dope in the woods (that had to wait until after tea).
So much for my baggage – which I tried to leave at the door when I started to listen, although it was impossible to avoid the occasional fleeting feeling of déjà vu. The album consists of a single forty-minute track. I know I’m biased (and Sinton and Ward sometimes move to other instruments), but double bass, baritone sax and clarinet is a great combination. My least favourite part was the first few minutes but, if you feel the same way, I’d say stick with it, as once the group engine hots up it’s a sustained, engaging listen, which is as it should be, given the track record of the musicians: Alex Ward played regularly with Derek Bailey’s Company, Lash has been a central figure in Oxford Improvisers and Sinton a member of Anthony Braxton’s Tricentric Orchestra. And as if the music wasn’t enough, Sinton’s generous album notes have some insightful, quotable things to say about the history of the free-form music scene. Well worth a read.
Ward and Lash feature on the next album, Hazard Calls, this time working with drummer/percussionist Mark Sanders, another Company veteran. Putting bass and clarinet together with percussion rather than sax makes for a drier, more exposed texture. The music is rich in ideas and endlessly multi-layered – your ear can wander between the three players at will and wherever it ends up, there’s something interesting going on. Listening to both these albums, I came to see them as almost a double album: it’s fascinating to listen to them side-by-side, to see how a slight change of line-up can affect the way people make music together.
Adjacent Planes is, at the time of writing, the latest release in the Recordiau Dukes label’s continuing mission to promote the improvised/experimental music scene in Wales. David Hopewell is the musical half of the music/spoken word duo, Hopewell Ink. Ash Cooke is an improvising musician and visual artist. He describes his work as exploring the connection between painting and music. In the album notes they describe how they attempted ‘to suppress any conscious control over the making process, allowing the unconscious mind to have greater sway.’
Jean Cocteau described art as ‘a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious’ and, on one level, the unconscious plays a massive part in any act of creation. Then there’s art which consciously sets out to deal with the unconscious. Here, there has always been a divide between work which seeks to describe or evoke it and work which attempts to relinquish control to it. One can add to that a third category: work which relinquishes control to it in an attempt to evoke it. The work of early twentieth century Expressionist composers probably falls into that third category, using atonality to represent the nightmarish and phantasmagorical. You could say that, since then, artistic approaches to the unconscious have tended to become less sensationalist – after all, what you find there is not only the stuff of nightmares but also that of everyday life. It was Jung who said, ‘until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’ If he’s right, then music that attempts to do this, if it succeeds, can empower us. Hopewell and Cooke’s project is no mere curiosity.
The high-points for me are the energy of Tangled Tra-la-la, the atmosphere of Accretion and the entrancing xylophone/delay line passages in the title-track. Definitely an album to come back to, I decided. The rest of Recordiau Dukes’ growing list is worth a look, too: not least because part of its mission is to document the activities of the North Wales-based Llif(T), a project which Cooke and Hopewell are regularly involved in and which describes itself as ‘an inclusive community group giving individuals the opportunity to play freely improvised ensemble music on a regular basis’.
Dominic Rivron
LINKS
LASH/SINTON/WARD: https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/lash-sinton-ward
Hazard Calls: https://shrikerecords.bandcamp.com/album/hazard-calls
Adjacent Planes: https://recordiaudukes.bandcamp.com/album/adjacent-planes