By Lee Rice Epstein
lll人 (Daichi Yoshikawa, Paul Abbott, Seymour Wright) - VICTOR
(Infant Tree, 2024)
Kavain Wayne Space & XT - YESYESPEAKERSYES (Feedback Moves,
2024)
yPLO - ob TRU (Feedback Moves, 2024)
@xcrswx & Lolina - 10” (Feedback Moves, 2023)
Anne Gillis + XT - Our/s Bouture(s) (Art Into Life, 2023)
Paul Abbott - Growl, Rubs, Drops, Claps (Live Growth) (s/r, 2023)
Seymour Wright - RITES (Alto Saxophone Solos 2003–2023) (s/r,
2023)
Paul Abbott and Seymour Wright have broken so much ground in improvised
and electro-acoustic music that, improbable as it seems, these seven albums
represent only a portion of their recently released and to-be-released
output (for example, Wright is also the saxophonist for [Ahmed], which
released both an album and boxed set this year). That seems true for any
musician, when a rush of albums they’ve been working towards are released
into the world at once. But Abbott and Wright have been producing at this
rate for several years, showing no signs of slowing. And what’s
most remarkable, listening to all this music together, is the astonishingly
high bar these releases set, within the space each one album inhabits (solo
free jazz, electro-acoustic, trio improvisation, experimental avant-garde,
whatever one settles on for descriptor).
For openers, the solo albums:
Growl, Rubs, Drops, Claps (Live Growth)
, a 2022 set recorded at Ateliers Claus in Brussels, and
RITES (alto saxophone solos 2003–2023),
a four-volume set collecting recordings made in Brussels and London,
spanning 20 years and diving headlong into a dozen delightful
rite/right/Wright puns.
There are maybe, truly, only a handful of drummers occupying similar spaces
as Abbott. His ingenuity and improvisational acumen are first rate, and
that's still only about half the story.
Growl, Rubs, Drops, Claps (Live Growth)
is a fantastic introduction to Abbott's sound world; like a modernist
novelist, he shows you how to listen as the solo progresses. Early taps and
clicks lead into rolls and clangs, with echoes of reverb and feedback
deepening the performance. Aspects of Abbott's solo music are sometimes
reminiscent of Mira Martin-Gray's
Stick Control for the Air Drummer
, while at other times he seems positively Tom Rainey-esque with his
seemingly loose-limbed, everywhere-at-once approach.
RITES is a monster of a solo alto sax set, truly four sets or maybe
15, depending on how one defines a set. And maybe one could even say,
depending on how one defines solo alto sax. Keys, mouthpieces, inhaling as
well as exhaling, fluttering and spattering, popping, clattering, it's as
physical as it is musical; the exhaustion one might feel listening to the
whole of it could be due to attempting to keep pace with Wright, whose
performance is some otherworldly confluence of Ornette Coleman's
playfulness, Evan Parker's experimentalism, Steve Lacy's innovation, and
Roscoe Mitchell's all-of-the-above. Wright's alto playing has a kind of
spiky assonance Mitchell practically invented, more often than not,
however, there's a kind of extreme commitment to what I'd call a search for
sound that's the most compelling aspect of all these (and previous) solo
recordings.
And so then, if Abbott and Wright each represent degrees of
iconoclasm—and… do they? Actually, I'm only using the term for the sake of
attempting something, but I feel it's too artificially imposed here. After
all, as Abbott and Michael Speers note on yPLO's ob TRU, "Perhaps a
drum is a space wrapped in material," and who am I to argue that point?
It's not an opinion that upsets the balance of what's un/known and/or
un/discovered about music and improvisation, it's simply another way at
looking at an object. It's a thing, or a container, or possibly both or
neither; it is a fixed (or not) amount of space manipulated to produce
sound. And isn't that also a horn? Wright, in a
recent
interview said, "There’s a tradition of alto saxophone solo music.
There’s a Chicagoan tradition, a UK tradition, a global tradition. And it’s
like, why not? It’s absurd for me to connect with that, in a way, but why
not?" There's something we can't ignore that makes their music quite
personal, the connections drawn between the candid, exposed edges on the
solo performances, or the mutually dependent construction of any of their
duo or trio collaborations—move one piece and the fragility is coldly
exposed.
Wright's duo with drummer Crystabel Riley is fascinatingly near and far
from his music with Abbott (which, more below). Riley, unsurprisingly, has
a markedly different approach to drums and noise, at times more like Oren
Ambarchi in her use of cracking snare and pulsing tones. As @xcrswx they've
released two singles and
a live session
for Café OTO's Takuroku
pandemic series. The 10" released last year on Feedback Moves is a split
with Lolina, like everything @xcrswx has released so far, there's a
vertiginous thrill in the music—straightforward beats take a left turn like
an early DJ /Rupture mix, sax hovers on a single real/fake note far longer
than a listener might be willing to endure; my advice, wait it out, let the
music take you.
It's clear why Abbott and Wright are drawn to each other, their shared
interest in imagined, speculative, or what they sometimes call potential
sounds has led to some of the most exciting new music of the last decade.
For example, Abbott's previously mentioned duo with Speers, yPLO, takes
this concept and zooms way in on the drum set. Their first album now plays
like a proof of concept, with the latest,
ob Tru, first recorded
live using "amplified mylar, floor tom, bass drum, mixers, audio recordings
and microphones" then processed and mixed down. The result is drums that
are not drums, drums that are spaces and surfaces, wrappings on sounds made
to be chopped and spliced.
Abbott and Wright's most well-known groups, XT and lll人, sound like a
maximalist performance of all their ideas, concepts, and experiments at
once. Following their trio album with Pat Thomas (which we Collectively
named
album
of the year in 2022),
Our/s Bouture(s)is an hour-long
recording made with sound artist Anne Gillis. The title implies cutting and
slicing, but the material is a deep exploration of resonance, silence,
repetition, and extremes. The music might fleetingly evoke John Zorn's
Hemophiliac group with Ikue Mori and Mike Patton, but more often Gillis,
Abbott, and Wright allow in more space and breath than on some of their
previous albums. And this is what makes XT such a fascinating group, they
sound exactly like themselves even when they sound what we might call
totally different from themselves. Familiar timbres, tones, and rhythmic
variations remain like echoes of other performances, whether from past
Gillis, Abbott, or Wright albums. That's not to imply there is any kind of
revisiting or retreading here; what I mean is, there are glimpses, here and
there, of a past gesture, threaded through constant pulses through to
future ideas, at times so fleeting they recede just as they begin to
emerge. One can imagine Abbott and Wright feel like this no matter who
they're playing with, looking to anchor some thoughts while letting others
float away, dissipating like high lonesome clouds.
All that was meant to evoke the feeling of listening to
Our/s Bouture(s)
, the rhythm and imagery, even wordplay where I've managed to shoehorn it
in, because plain description will sound utterly boring. This gets even
more challenging on the latest XT album, recorded with Kavain Wayne Space,
a.k.a. RP Boo, the groundbreaking footwork DJ.
YESYESPEAKERSYES is
the second recording with this trio, the first was a Café OTO download-only
release under XT & RP Boo. If that one was a delight, then
YESYESPEAKERSYES
is a demand, as in demands your attention. We run out of ways here to say
something is breaking new ground or blowing our minds or playing on repeat
nonstop on our stereos/headphones/wireless devices/smartphones/car radios.
And yes, the complete hour-long set from 2021 that the vinyl pulls from is
available for download if you purchase through Bandcamp. But it's really
those vinyl sides that make the difference. For one thing, these sets
showcase other obsessions of Abbott and Wright, namely the club, disco, and
soul music that's much of the core of Space's music. Samples, beats, and
skronks playfully push and pull at each other, electronic whirrs bounce off
Wright's trills. Space has a brilliant sense of humor, there's a
playground-like vibe at times, I would love to be at one of these shows.
The notes reference mutual interest in the music of Chicago, and
YESYESPEAKERSYES
sounds most like (if it sounds like anything else at all) an Art Ensemble
for the future (there's Mitchell again hovering over our shoulder).
And this leads us to lll人 (pronounced "el"), Abbott and Wright's trio
with sound artist Daichi Yoshikawa, a fellow alum of Eddie Prévost's
workshops. Of the three, Wright has written the most about AMM, including a
PhD dissertation, and although (once again, here we are) the music bears
little resemblance on the surface, if you can allow yourself to relax into
it, there's a harmony between the two groups. It's not a perfect
symmetrical equation, like Gare=Wright, Rowe=Yoshikawa, Prévost=Abbott;
it's more like a symmetry of shared values, the sublimation of ego and
pursuit of an ensemble sound that emerges in the moment. That's a high bar
to be sure, AMM is one a high-water mark for any free improvising group,
but as they've written about themselves, "the tools are familiar, the
listening is not." Similarly, the players are familiar, the music is not.
Dedicated to the late Victor Schonfield, VICTOR presents two
unbroken performances from August and December 2016. It's the first album
in nearly 10 years from lll人, and of course just hearing them again one
immediately hopes it won't be nearly as long before there's another album
(unlike some of you, I can't just pop down to Café OTO of an evening,
unfortunately). The shows display some of the clearest, rawest playing from
Abbott and Wright since the solo recordings, mentioned above. Wright had me
howling at the stereo, his playing is maniacally daring. The energy
generated by Yoshikawa is off the charts—he mentions in his note to
Schonfield that he stopped playing for a few years, and while these
recordings capture the group before that break, there is nevertheless a
specter (the approaching COVID pandemic and the May/Johnson or more
broadly May/Johnson/Trump years that followed) lingering around the edges
of "Ah," the December recording. By then, we were well into the knowledge
of what was to come: the Western ascendance of extreme conservatism,
economic hardship, and xenophobia. The piercing and wailing moans from
Yoshikawa and Wright open the set, then quickly yield to Abbott who resets
the pace before launching them right back to breakneck. VICTOR is
astonishing, unrelenting, and emotionally purifying, an incredible
achievement that's sure to be a classic of free improvisation.
