Cameron/Horne/Flaten/Thomson - Place Is The Space (Personal Archives, 2022)

By Keith Prosk

Lisa Cameron, Jonathan Horne, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, and Joshua Thomson freely play six tracks with percussion, electric guitar, contrabass, and alto saxophone on the 53’ Place Is The Space.

Cameron and Flaten have previously recorded together on Tau Ceti with Tom Carter. And Horne and Flaten have appeared together in The Young Mothers with Stefan González, Jason Jackson, Frank Rosaly, and Jawwaad Taylor, most recently on Morose , in Flaten’s Village Songs ensemble on Den Signede Dag , and with John Dikeman and Stefan González on Texas Butt Biters from 2022.

Loose elements coalesce into grooves smooth and peaceful. A plucked low end lyricism lends honeyed melodies as much as any rhythmic character. Catch small glimpses of guitar’s ecstatic attack as gestural as musical through its clean tones in snaking lines or its harmonic sustain for an organ-like haze. An interlude of music box lullabies from kalimba’s twinkling plucks. Saxophone sounds smoky and sultry, discrete notes smoothed to soft curves. And the kit sets the energy, skipping klang for cheery play, shimmering cymbals with bathing harmonies, hiccuping kicks and tapped snare and cymbal trance for meditative moments. Sometimes the group plays pointillistic dialogues and the closer “Welding An Inverted Flap” boils over the energy bubbling under the entire set, but more often the group approaches a space together and simmers, permutating there. In a calm mood that could be triangulated from In A Silent Way and the first half of Atlantis. Transporting the ear to other worlds in the outer and inner mind.