Altered Forms Trio have been playing together since 2019 and the opening track of this album renders this fact obvious – the interactions between the musicians express a familiarity and comfort, a sort of gentle confidence that each knows they are safe in the presence of the others. Indeed, my immediate, initial, impression of this album was that it was complacent . The piano’s tinkling opening with the gentle ‘phhwwhip’ of Robert Lucaciu’s double-bass, accompanied by a sort of intermittent rattling sound on the drums is so standard, so trope-ish, that I think I might actually have rolled my eyes…
Imagine, then, my surprise when, just as I was settling into the not-so-challenging aspects of the album, just when I had resigned myself to listening to circa 41 minutes of this sonic beige, Gregor Forbes’ gentle piano and Johannes von Buttlar’s ‘gently rattling jazz drums’ violently pivot into a really frenetic piece of music led by a pounding double-bass that sounds like it’s being chased around an unevenly inflated balloon. Just as you get the sense that the musicians have grown too comfortable together to be excited with each other’s playing, everything switches - the music becomes innovative and interesting; the complacency turns to excitement, the comfort turns to invigoration, the familiarity turns to desperation.
And this shift doesn’t occur just once or twice, it’s the defining feature of the album. The strange and radical changes in mood, tone, style and energy between songs creates a sort of aesthetic incoherence – and not just between tracks, but often within the songs themselves. This makes the overall dynamic of the album intellectually challenging to access; individually, the songs mostly work on their own (internal) terms, but as a collection it requires a bit more from the listener.
On my initial listen-through of this album a review formed in my mind that said something like ‘there are occasional flourishes of brilliance, interspersed, for some bizarre reason, with what appear to be moments of unneeded respite’. Without careful attention, the performance will sound at points too generic, then at others too academic, then at others still, too mundane. But the album rewards attention and close (and, in my case, repeated ) listening... The first time I listened through I got to the end of the album and had the vague sense that I found it too generic to comment on, too generic to write a review about. The second time I listened to the album, I was genuinely shocked I had the impression I did after the first listen. It was, to my surprise, pretty good! By the time I gave the album a third listen, I was positively into it. I might be revealing my own limitations here (no bad thing, perhaps), but it’s only when you realise what the album is doing, the unsettling way it moves from avant-garde and experimental to something approaching (but not quite) cliché, that you realise the nearly-generic-sounding ‘respite’ moments are themselves part of the avant-garde-adjacent context setting for the strange and joyous playfulness that the album leans into.
Is this effect intentional? And, if so, why take the risk? In a world where everyone has an at-hand near infinite supply of streamable jazz, producing a slowly percolating album is quite the risk. People, or at least, algorithms, will not often give you the chance to make a first impression, let alone a second or third. Albums like this show what is wrong with the passive consumption model on which many services are based. Buy this album for this reason alone. Listen to it repeatedly for the reasons I’ve given prior to this.
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