Ezz-thetics a column by This column is a loose gathering of recordings – two duos, two quartets – that might define a certain frontier, a degree of meaning in improvised interactivity spreading over 12 years. At times, the combination of close listening and simultaneous writing (the only way I can find to describe this music) results in verbal collisions that may be elusive in meaning, but they may also legitimately represent some of the transformative complexity and overlapping visions arising in these works of essentially collective invention. Though one of these recordings is more than a decade old, they may represent a kind of perpetual edge. Certain musics can pass through walls of custom, identity, and meaning, assuming unknown shapes, escaping any strict verbal denotation, meaning becoming at once plastic and ineffable. Such music cannot be analyzed or described successfully, such failed exercises, however, perhaps contributing to both its mystery and its beauty, music that might suggest a hymn from an unknown culture, possibly disappeared, to an unknown deity, possibly deceased. In collectively improvised music, the role of the listener is paramount: assembling, collecting, composing ... At the same time, however, no interpretation is more privileged than another. These particular recordings are by musicians who can create dreams in sound. Some will imagine mills or factory floors, tuned to and amplifying unimaginable inventions of human industry. Empathy contributes a mutating, transformational soundscape. These are musics that create uncommon space. Die Dritte Ebene (45 rpm LP, NiVuNiConnu, nvnc-lp062) by Emilio Gordoa and the late Sven-Åke Johansson might initially seem exotic. Ultimately, it’s not. It’s work of perfect transparency, that is, a view of whatever one hears as the other side of anywhere. The cover offers two titles, DIE DRITTE EBEN or EL TERCER NIVEL, “the third level,” in German or Spanish, with each phrase written with the “E”s written as reversed 3s. The phrase arises in Gordoa’s brief description appended to the Bandcamp page: “We were discussing how our music moves as if in parallel lines, and how after a while something third will emerge from it, almost like a ghost. It is something I find almost mystical: how this third level manifested itself in our playing without us thinking about it.” Reminiscent of Johansson’s previous NiVuNiConnu release, Tea Time, with Nicholas Bussmann and Yan Jun, the music hints at Erik Satie’s Furniture Music, somehow constituting a radical background music that enhances consciousness, the special resonance of repeated materials creating a trance-like, near-ecstatic state, a reflective consciousness that rises between the parts created by Johansson and Gordoa, illuminating as well as hypnotic. Die Dritte Ebene, from August 26, 2023, points to an ineffable quality – a kind of trance, a kind of lift, a spectral point of attention that is produced in a listener’s collaboration with the close echoes, tight resonance and metallic rattle of Johansson’s snare, the reeds of his accordion, and the glassy ring of Gordoa’s vibraphone, glowing like light in sonic form. The shared insistence and simultaneity of Johansson and Gordoa’s work consistently expands what is essentially a minimalist musical environment, concluding with a strange abstraction of accordion and vibraphone that might suggest a kind of musical haunting. Nate Wooley and Seymour Wright recorded About Trumpet and Saxophone in 2012, appearing on the Fataka label in 2013. While that release was unquestionably radical, its forthcoming successor, recorded in 2025, About Saxophone and Trumpet (Relative Pitch) takes a very different initial tack, opening with a deconstruction of the romantic ballad “The Midnight Sun,” composed by Lionel Hampton and Sonny Burke in 1947, recorded initially as an instrumental, with sufficient melodic grace to have lyrics later added by Johnny Mercer, spurring recordings by June Christy, Ella Fitzgerald, and Carmen McRae. Here the melody is clearly audible through a series of gasps, honks, and shattered, incomplete phrases, a nod to tradition that rapidly expands, becoming increasingly inclusive. There follows “Experiment Four,” an extended dialogue which includes some of the strangest sounds ever emitted by saxophone and trumpet, often coming from very different positions in the sound spectrum. The fourth track, “Untitled,” is genuinely conversational, though the conversation is conducted in assorted bleats and blasts. Each musician is repeatedly triggered by the other’s material, whether pinching their sound inward, or adapting a radical extroversion. Music here will stand in for complex human relationships and perceptions, a sound store evolving to mark the impact of events in one’s daily life, worlds for which artists have long been refining their techniques and perceptions. As our descriptive apparatus daily fails before global events, our key artists stretch the elements. In that sense, call it modern syntactical practice or a soundtrack to Guernica, but the expressive range in which Wooley and Wright here operate seems perfectly in keeping with the daily news. Meanwhile, the inner tunings and sustained tones, even their matching fast vibratos suggest the development and synergy of an expressionist language. Sudden shifts will swiftly resemble elegant balladry of yore, echoes of that “Midnight Sun.” While the Wooley/Wright duet recalls Fataka, Trevor Brent’s remarkable label – “‘dedicated to releasing recordings of small group and solo improvisations with a particular interest in situations where a common musical language has not yet fully emerged” – has become active again, releasing Parallels & Diagonals by a quartet from the label’s earlier period, 14th July 2014 at Cafe Oto, in which Wooley and Wright appear in a quartet with two percussionists active since the dawn of English free improvisation, Paul Lytton and Eddie Prévost. Contrary to Brent’s explanation of the label (and a genuine generational difference: the percussionists had discographies before the wind players were born), the four musicians seem so closely attuned – each a genuine spontaneous composer – that they sound like they might have had a long history together. Parallels and Diagonals is 12-year-old music, but it sounds like it might be recorded next year. The opening track, the extended Parallel A, sounds like a machine shop that has discovered free improvisation, shifting dramatically after a passage of silence shortly after the 15-minute mark. The sounds suggest a light roll on a kettle drum, a brush on a cymbal, the sound of air pushed delicately through a trumpet. This notion of interiority marks the collective passage of these musicians, finding a terrain at once both barely imagined and yet a defining part of the human condition. In Diagonal A, fundamental gestures, like air squeezed through a metal tube, take on their own significance, behaving like Buddhist mudras, invoking fundamental gestures and symptoms of human life, murmurs, signs, abrasions. Diagonal B’s rapid actions and continuous overlapping suggest activity so closely attended by the musicians that it might follow a score in which the pauses might be carefully accounted, floating among a delicately bowed cymbal, other sounds that cannot be identified, and some that shimmer around audibility. foam and mesh (Fundacja Słuchaj Records) by the B:A:N:S BAND is the work of pianist Sophie Agnel, saxophonist John Butcher, bassist Pascal Niggenkemper, and percussionist Ståle Liavik Solberg, recorded at the 2024 ArtAct Festival in St. Johann, Austria. While it’s the only grouping here with a conventional instrumental grouping, the orientation of the musicians will ensure that there is nothing resembling convention in the ways that the instruments are utilized. foam and mesh I is clearly the main event, a 35-minute dialogue in which four of the most skilled spontaneous composers put together a dense weave of sonic events, with nothing predictable, yet everything interlocking. Tension curves are developed with astonishing power, each member of the quartet seemingly pursuing a unique and independent path, yet everything contributing to an astonishing rhythmic taffy-pull in which every part contribute to a compound and original overall momentum. This complex relationship will sustain through numerous group movements, whether slow balladic ruminations with isolated knocks and flurries or a sudden tense wedding of trembling oscillations, all four musicians regularly finding distinct timbres. The relatively brief foam and mesh II initially foregrounds Agnel’s piano, her focus initially on brief, isolated, tight-knit clusters with abstract flurries from Niggenkemper’s bass and the randomizing knitwork of Liavik Solberg. When Butcher initially enters on soprano saxophone, the random patterns generally coalesce into a continuous stream of different rhythms and complementary densities before the work’s ultimately gradual disappearance.
© 2026 Stuart Broomer
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