It’s sometimes said that we know less about the ocean than we do about outer space, a palpable nonsense which points to how much of the ocean we have left to explore and pricks at a notion that William Burroughs and plenty other writers or esotericists have plied, which is that to go out and to gain a fuller appreciation of ourselves or the world around us, we first have to go deep within.
William Burroughs the shooter-upper and surrealist and cut-up artist described himself as a ‘cosmonaut of inner space’. He wrote that ‘Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biological state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole’ and he also wrote ‘But please remember that nothing is true in space. That there is no time in space – that what goes up under such auspices must come down – that the beginning is also the end’. Describing humankind on the threshold of space, he suggested ‘We are like water creatures looking up at the land and air and wondering how we can survive in that alien medium’.
For almost fifty years, more people had set foot on the moon than had descended to the deepest part of our ocean, Challenger Deep at the southern end of the Mariana Trench. In early 1960, the duo of Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard became the first people to reach Challenger Deep just as the space race was gathering momentum, with the historic Apollo 11 mission – which put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in the summer of 1969 – followed just a few months later by the success of Apollo 12. In all between 1969 and the end of 1972, twelve people stepped out onto the moon, while it took until 2012 for the next visitor to Challenger Deep, when James Cameron ‘the man who reconstructed the Titanic but would not himself sink’ completed the first solo descent. Such trips have become almost commonplace since 2019 owing to the efforts and investments of Victor Vescovo and his deep-submergence vehicle Limiting Factor.
The first collaboration between Andreas Tilliander and Goran Kajfeš is billed as a journey to the moon but it could easily be mistaken for a descent to the dankest depths of our ocean, as ‘Montes Caucasus’ – named after a rugged mountain range on the northeastern part of the moon – sounds aqueous and submerged, as though the duo were surveying the ocean floor through their murky blend of brass, wind and electronics. In fact for this, their album’s opening track, the trumpeter Kajfeš lays down his signal instrument and plays instead a metal flute which he found in his late father’s belongings, its slender bleeps chiming like sonar or echolocation.
Tilliander and Kajfeš are two veterans of the Swedish experimental scene, with Tilliander a prolific record producer and engineer whose own music stretches from his pioneering ‘clicks & cuts’ efforts to dub and drone electronics under his own name and the monickers Mokira, Lowfour and TM404, while Kajfeš has racked up a compendium of credits across jazz and pop contexts and is a longtime member of Nacka Forum while leading the ensemble Goran Kajfeš Tropiques, whose latest album Tell Us proved one of the best trips of 2024.
Their first meeting is referenced by way of the album closer ‘Twozerozerofive’, the year when the two artists struck up a conversation at an afterparty after being awarded at the Grammis, the oldest music awards ceremony in Sweden, with Kajfeš winning the gong for best jazz record for Headspin while Tilliander took home the best club or dance accolade for World Industries. That conversation planted the seed for a future collaboration, which has now blossomed some twenty years hence, with the album’s title In Cmin a nod to the minimalist composer Terry Riley and his seminal work ‘In C’ which was first performed in late 1964 in San Francisco.
Much like William Burroughs, who experimented with peyote and wrote about it in his novels Junkie and Naked Lunch – finding it nauseating and instead attaining a higher plane through yagé which he hankered for during a seven-month stint in the Amazon rainforest – Riley was on a quest for spiritual awakening and deeper understanding, saying that when it came to the composition of ‘In C’:
I was never concerned with minimalism, but I was very concerned with psychedelia and the psychedelic movement of the sixties as an opening toward consciousness. For my generation that was a first look towards the East, that is peyote, mescaline and the psychedelic drugs which were opening up people’s attention towards higher consciousness.
The record title also reflects the decision of Tilliander and Kajfeš to compose in C minor, as they worked out the eight tracks of In Cmin during extended improvisational sessions in the studio. The result lands at an unusual intersection, as while the lunar purview or the concept of space exploration is fairly commonplace in jazz – a fixture of many far-out, spiritual or Arkestran evocations – the textures here are mottled and murky though there is a certain kinship with the new album by Ledley which is also out this week, far removed in terms of subject matter as the British duo pay tribute to the Tottenham Hotspur defender Ledley King. Chalk up that similarity then to nothing but strange serendipity, a shared sound palette and perhaps a mutual headspace that has wafted out across the choppy Kattegat and Skagerrak and the nebulous depths and currents of the North Sea.
From the roiling electronics and sonar flute of the opener ‘Montes Caucasus’, on the second track ‘More Than Worlds’ the trumpet of Kajfeš blows arabesques whose sense of locale is scrambled by the martian treatments of Tilliander, like a space probe scuttling over the surface of the red planet, the lurching rhythms of a marswalk or the furtive peek-a-boo of a pair of antennas. ‘Minor Sea’ is more spectral and cinematic, an aching trumpet hanging over the composition as Tilliander focuses on the mechanics, and that drama continues into ‘Nef Argo’ which closes out the first side, as Kajfeš probes through a rich tone while Tilliander taps out a clave-like rhythm which turns into water droplets, prompting a chemical reaction which spills out over the remainder of the piece until it is arrested by trumpet fanfares, syrupy or thick as molasses.
Dull thudding percussion and more staticky electronics begin ‘Moon of Eris’, with Tilliander’s favoured Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer almost playing a vamp beneath the faintest squeals of the brass. If some touchstones are more readily apparent – with some of the basslines suggesting the dub of King Tubby or the sea-dwelling yet decidedly futuristic electro of Drexciya – others are harder to grasp, with ‘Moon of Eris’ for instance more Another Green World than Music for Airports and at times calling to mind the patented G-funk melodies of The Chronic and its hit single ‘Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang’.
Broadly the second half of In Cmin retracts the landing gear and allows the duo to float ineffably and inevitably but still observantly through the luminous blackness of interstellar space. On the shorter ‘Bending Things’ they are content to move the furniture about in their ship, while ‘Moss’ sounds relatively stately before that album closer ‘Twozerozerofive’ carries washes of sound which whip across the mix, like the ominous whooshing which emanates from The Arm and other figures in Twin Peaks: The Return on a track which also reminds me of the Bosch end credits piece with its lonesome yet defiant bugle.
