Recent Releases by the Scottish Label scatterArchive

By Eyal Hareuveni

The Glasgow-based label scatterArchive, run by Liam Stefani, operates by the model of pay-what-you-can-afford but manages to release precious gems by established improvisers and surprising and promising new names every week.

Sophie Agnel et Jérôme Noetinger - Un clavier bien tempéré (scatterArchive, 2024)

French hyper pianist Sophie Agnel is known for her trio with the British rhythm section of double bass player John Edwards and drummer Steve Noble as well as her collaborations with like-minded fearless improvisers like John Butcher, Phil Minton or Daunik Lazro. Un clavier bien tempéré (A well-tempered keyboard) is her second recorded collaboration with fellow French explorer of the Revox B77 reel-to-reel tape machine and electronics player Jérôme Noetinger, following Rouge Gris Bruit (with electronics player Lionel Marchetti, Potlatch, 2001). It features six pieces, mixed and edited by Noetinger, taken from a longer free improvised session at Pied Nu in Le Havre in December 2018.

This ironically-titled album is a set of fascinating and uncompromising sonic collisions of Agnel playing inside the piano, with preparations and objects and exhausting all its timbral range, with Noetinger pushing her imaginative spectrum of sounds even further with his own real-time processed electronics. Agnel and Noetinger find surprising yet playful, twisted and distorted, poetic resonances between the acoustic sounds of the hyper piano and the electronic sounds of magnetic tapes. Only after a few listening sessions you may begin to fully appreciate the richness and the great imagination of the sound universes of Agnel and Noetinger along with their restless desire to reach unchartered sonic territories. Highly recommended. 

 

John Butcher with Oxford Improvisers - Chakrasana (scatterArchive, 2024) 

Chakrasana is a back-bending asana in yoga as exercise. It happens to be the title of the album of of British master sax player John Butcher with the 10-musician ensemble Oxford Improvisers, with no proof that either side had to bend its aesthetics. Chakrasana was recorded at the White House in Oxford in October 2022. The album features two improvisations of Butcher with the Oxford Improvisers, two solos of Butcher and one improvisation of alto sax player Mark Browne, trumpeter Dan Goren and clarinetist Paul Medley of the Oxford Improvisers.

The opening, short piece of Butcher with Oxford Improvisers explores the distinct sonic possibilities of this ad-hoc ensemble, enhanced by Lawrence Casserley, credited with various sounders. The second, extended improvisation of Butcher and Oxford Improvisers dares more and searches for unknown, riskier yet highly stimulating territories. The music in these improvisations follows the ensemble’s mission: music is not seen as a universal language but as a set of agreed methods of communication by a particular community. Butcher’s solos focus on the saxes - soprano and tenor - as means for sculpting different shapes of air, with a thoughtful and poetic sense of form and structure, and masterful command, technique and imagination. The Oxford Improvisers trio investigates playfully the corresponding resonances of the reeds and brass instruments.

Pat Thomas - كنز القلب (Kanza al Kalb) (scatterArchive, 2024) 

كنز القلب (Kanza al Kalb) means the treasure of the heart in Arabic, where the heart is home to sublime knowledge that intellect cannot comprehend. It relates to the Sufi belief that the heart contains seven treasures, each of them in a separate, secure chamber. كنز القلب is the fourth album of electronics by Path Thomas for scatterArchive. Thomas plays Kontakt sampled instruments in real-time in Logic, then manipulated in [the IRCAM software] TimeStretch.

The nine pieces explore the rich sonic vision of Thomas. He is inspired by Sufi poetry, and the first piece, “For Ibn Arabi”, is dedicated to the great Andalusian Sufi Master Muḥyiddīn Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), who wrote the poem “Tarjumān al-Ashwāq” (ترجمان الأشواق, The Disclosure of Desires). The following pieces are restless and imaginative sonic experiments - and collisions - with noise and other extreme pitches, or employing various echoes as a means for creating an ethereal mood.

Rhodri Davies + Andrew Leslie Hooker - deuawd (scatterArchive, 2024)

Welsh hyper harpist Rhodri Davies has collaborated with an eclectic list of creative forces, including British pioneer free improvisers like John Tilbury, Derek Bailey, Christian Marclay and John Butcher, art rock heroes like David Sylvian, Jim O’Rourke and Jenny Hval, and many others. deuawd is a 25-minute piece of Davies on pedal harp and preparations with fellow Welsh visual artist-composer Andrew Leslie Hooker on no-input mixing board, electronic filters & amplification, recorded at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David in Abertawe in June 2018.

Hooker’s poem attempts to suggest the spirit of this release (A single point of compressed intensity / A black hole of sound and movement / All possible sound / All possible movement / Condensed together in an instant / Exploding inwardly…). A quote from German composer Eva-Maria Houben attempts to answer the question of why they perform and what is the sense of it: “We do what we do because we carry the hope of change. This is the great hope. That what we are doing can reveal another world, through how we perform, how we live out our relations with others, how we listen to one another. Being together, in this time, in this space, we can show, from our practice, another world. We can show that there is a way that we can make a reality which is full of peace”. This piece asks us to expand our listening skills to the minimalist, gently resonating sounds of the prepared and processed harp as “Time will stop once and for all / All sound / All movement / Folded in on itself”, just as described in Hooker’s poem.