Soundchambers is a recording by laptop musician Ekkehard
Ehlers, trumpeter Franz Hautzinger and guitarist Joseph
Suchy. The group were formed to provide sound for an
art installation in a park in Porto, however the outcome
is a much more musical affair than might have been expected
for such a project. Whether Soundchambers is
a temporary grouping or an ongoing one is unknown, though
on the strength of this offering it’s to be hoped
the latter will be the case.
The first of the five untitled tracks begins in rainforest
mode, full of birdcalls and insect noises. This chorus
is joined by the breathy, metallic sound of air resonating
through Hautzinger’s trumpet: initially too gentle
to create music, it’s atmospherically rich in
itself. Then music comes in long slow notes, supported
by germinal rhythms, popping and clicking and almost
indistinguishable from the tapestry of the forest canopy.
Suchy’s liquid guitar completes the ensemble to
create a rich sonic mulch. Track two appears to take
place in a metal quarry where blasting reverberates
across large expanses while Hautzinger traces mournful
fanfares in the air above. On track three Ehlers introduces
piano samples (from fellow Staubgold artist Adam Butler)
that freeze, fragment and stutter in brief loops, and
across which Suchy slurs reversed guitar. Hautzinger’s
playing here owes a notable debt to Jon Hassell’s
work as well as, at one point, to the mournful/noble
signature of Nils Petter Molvaer (himself a sometime
Hassell acolyte). In fact the whole sonic landscape
of Soundchambers may be traced to the wellspring
of Hassell’s oeuvre, particularly The Surgeon
Of The Nightsky Restores Dead Things By The Power Of
Sound (1987). Track four rises out of hiss, radio
signals, sundry bleeps and breath like the atmosphere
rising out of a tropical swamp.
In David Toop’s recent book, Haunted Weather,
the author recounts his experience of a two-part concert
in a Tokyo bar-cum-performance space. The first part
of the evening consisted of a network of laptop performers
distributed amongst the audience and interacting relatively
anonymously to improvise a limnal dronescape. For the
second part the network was joined by two musicians
playing traditional instruments whose sensitive but
more traditional performances caused their laptop-based
colleagues to fall into awkward silence. Toop views
this as a significant experience symbolic of the difficulty
of the interaction of two different approaches and disciplines.
Although it may sometimes appear that the world is awash
with a flood of electronica of almost biblical proportions,
there are of course whole other musical worlds centred
upon the exploration and discipline of instrumental
technique. Two parallel but independent strands of jazz,
surely one of the genres most focused upon technique,
present significant potential for interaction with electronica:
- the electric jazz hybrids of the 1970s spearheaded
by Miles Davis, Herbie Mwandishi Hancock et al. Characterised
by an awareness and assimilation of other musics as
well as an increasingly electronic palette
- the explorations of free improvisation from the 1960s
onwards initiated by AMM and MEV. Characterised by a
focus upon microtonal events, ambience, noise and sampling
via radios, etc.
Soundchambers sits at the convergence of electronica,
soundscaping and improvisation and is fascinating for
viability and attractiveness of the resultant synthesis.
It’s an area brimming with possibilities but relatively
under-explored; the gradual appearance of laptops in
the more forward-looking jazz ensembles has failed to
result in any significant engagement with electronica’s
abstraction or its new soundworlds. For example, Ikue
Mori’s laptop contributions to Dave Douglas’s
Freak-In band appear to provide coloration rather than
any structural recombination or deconstruction. A love
of both sonic and musical interaction is clearly audible
on Soundchambers and makes for fascinating
listening. It can only be hoped that this trio will
reconvene and explore these possibilities further.
Colin Buttimer
4/5 |
