Ezz-thetics a column by Discussing his music’s source, Duke Ellington, a piano within reach, remarked, “Oh, man, I've got a million dreams. That's all I do is dream, all the time ... this isn’t piano, this is dreaming.” John Coltrane once said that he had heard himself sounding like Albert Ayler in a dream but had never been able to reproduce it. The musics gathered here, three recent recordings released on Relative Pitch, whether collectively improvised or to a degree “composed,” are dream musics: shifting, evanescent, usually beyond the application of form, calling up their own sonic worlds. Even in cases where there’s a composer involved, these are collaborations in utopian time, communal dreams that invite the listener into their construction. I first heard Hubbub on Hoib, a 2002 concert released in 2004, a then rare Matchless release that didn’t feature AMM or its members. I’ve heard Hubbub live twice, first in Quebec at FIMAV in 2005 and again in Lisbon at Jazz em Agosto in 2007. I suspect it was the first of those live performance that revealed the sources of Hubbub’s sonic unity to me, and I’ve always taken a certain idiot delight in its sonic inversion, creating a hypnotic weave of continuous tones from what looks like an R&B band: two saxophones, a Les Paul guitar, piano, and drums. With the retirement of the senior ensembles of MEV and AMM, and the rare get-togethers of Parker-Guy-Lytton, Hubbub, almost a secret, remains as one of the most achieved and original of currently practicing improvising ensembles, as profound as they are durable. Over the decades, the personnel has remained remarkably stable, as enduring as any individual performance or realization of what is uniquely Hubbub. Whether it’s the bowed strings and cymbals, the circular-breathing of the reed players, or perhaps an occasional e-bow, Hubbub is one of the world’s longest running pseudo-drone bands (that is, a band that suggests constantly that they’re playing a drone while reconstituting a dense, continuous fabric of overtones, subtly shifting clusters and recombinant materials).Together for 25 years though, they can sound like they were playing Lhasa in 1300. They’re the Mill of the Gods and a Formula 1 pit crew. The expansive opening piece of abb abb abb, “abb,” is both looming and tangential, an ever-shifting maze of diverse sonic events. A honk, a blow, a distant wail coming closer: the identities of individual sounds are less significant than the ways in which they impinge – singularly, collectively – on the emerging experience constructed in the listening. Mundane sounds – repeating clicks, a sidewalk gameboard – may suggest little in themselves, yet ultimately contribute to complex, elusive, psychic states and enduring sonic experiences. The second track, the relatively brief (22:29) “abb abb,” can cover ages, beginning in the industrial, with Denzler’s circular crescendos on tenor suggesting a bandsaw, and the whistling highs of Mariage and Perraud suggesting scraped metal. Gradually (such things are inevitable), the machine shop will become eerily and beautifully reflective, enacting the industrial reverie of machines, voices reshaped by amplification and echo, sharpened steel spears of sound bleeding into feedback, other abrasions crushed under their own intensity, amplified cymbals whistling through it all. It looks like an R&B band 65 years on, and it sounds like Edgard Varèse 65 years on. The large French improvising orchestra, Onceim, is directly related to Hubbub: Frédéric Blondy is the orchestra director, while Bertrand Denzler, and Jean-Sébastien Mariage are among the personnel. Some 34 members strong, Kin to organizations like the London Improvisers’ Orchestra, Onceim includes many distinguished improvisers from its local community, including violinist Patricia Bosshard, bassist Benjamin Duboc, clarinetists Xavier Charles and Joris Rühl, saxophonists Pierre-Antoine Badaroux and Stéphane Rives, trumpeter Franz Hautzinger, and drummer Antonin Gerbal. Here such voices disappear into the ensemble, along with any reservation about the significance of the improvising orchestra. Without questioning the methodologies employed in the construction of Onceim’s works – whether sectional division, conductor codes, or gathering points in a minimalist score – the effect is utterly original and the music never feels contrived. The unity of the Hubbub quintet appears here in a much larger ensemble, previously heard in Onceim’s realizations of Eliane Radigue’s Occam’s Ocean (various versions available on Youtube). The principal work of Laminaire is “Gorges Gard,” a 49-minute piece that not only distinguishes Onceim, but which marks a major achievement in improvised music. There is an aura of hypnotic anarchy about the work, every individual sound sculpted to the ideal length, including every crescendo or diminuendo of an obscure accompanying voice. The textures range from traditional string-rich longing and triumph to the harsh lyricism of weighty objects crashing to the factory floor, while real and/or mechanical birds chatter surreptitiously in the rafters. It’s work in which Olivier Messiaen or Edgard Varèse might take pride, its achieved gestures sometimes transforming the work in an instant, all contrast alive as it is captured and expanded in the resonant air. If this is improvised music, and to a significant degree it is, the issue is not its musical value but it's worth to the world, an event in communication that suggests improvisation as an evolutionary force, minds within minds, tones and timbres, overtones and undertones stretching across difference, adjusting alignments and creating symmetries. Magda Mayas’ group Filamental may be more exotic still, both in the conception and realization of two pieces. Filamental has Mayas responsible for Rhodes electric piano, harmonium, and composition, with two reed players Christine Abdelnour on alto saxophone and Michael Thieke. The rest of the ensemble consists of string players, but not in any conventional assembly: Angharad Davies plays violin, Anthea Caddy and Aimée Theriot-Ramos, cellos and Rhodri Davies and Zena Parkins, harps. Mayas and Angharad Davies recorded their parts together, while the other six members of the ensemble recorded themselves individually. No hints are supplied about the compositional methodology determining the material, but the music can range from isolated, dissociated collections of tones to sustained ensemble string passages that are highly organized, though one is unsure how. The first of Ritual Mechanics’ two pieces is “Re-Contour,” as subtly mysterious a collection of sounds that one might imagine, beginning in isolated tones from harmonium, bell-like electric piano and violin, sounding like a music that might be conceived by the instruments themselves, the gentlest of resonances, quietly expanding for the next twenty minutes with gentle rustles, scratches, and almost secret individual expansions. A distinct rhythmic beat quietly asserts itself mid-way but subsides after a minute. Beautiful rustles of strings, microscopic flurries, appear, but they’re virtually whispered, whether a cello pattern briefly repeated, a duet of cellos or harps, or a hanging Rhodes tone, all secret messages, at once intended for our ears yet with what is conveyed evanescent, beyond. The second piece, “Ritual Mechanics,” brings an utterly different set of textures to a piece that is nonetheless similar in its radical subtlety. Plucked strings with abbreviated attacks may suggest the timbre of banjos, a broad cello vibrato stretches toward oscillator, the winds, too, insert high pitches that hover in the realm of whisper. Certain extended techniques serve to suggest percussion instruments that simply aren’t here. It’s a pietistic world of sound, its voice suddenly assembling in contrasting patterns, pitches and rhythm, insistently a language of dreams among instruments, whether whispering them to the musicians or grateful for their liberation here. As the work stretches toward long tones – the sustained harmonium, the thrum of harps, the slow bow, something with a certain music box character engaging the full ensemble – it is as if an orchestra has whispered itself into existence in an act of transcendence, only to turn inward again with a kind of sweet and arcane scattershot of tones.
© 2024 Stuart Broomer
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