Casting between improvisational jazz and the scuzzier margins of alternative rock, the guitarist Nels Cline and his Wilco bandmate on drums Glenn Kotche, the bassist Darin Gray who with Kotche is one half of the longstanding duo On Fillmore while serving as Jim O’Rourke’s low-end of choice, and another percussionist in the form of the everywhere man Chris Corsano, whose rip-roaring solo album The Key (Became the Important Thing [and Then Just Faded Away]) also landed this week, band together as the Saccata Quartet for the relentless bric-á-brac of Septendecim.
The title of the record implies the rare dual emergence of cicadas which took place this spring, when the widely distributed Brood XIX which has a 13-year life cycle emerged above ground at the same time as the 17-year Brood XIII for the first time since 1803. The convergence of these cicadas was limited to the central Illinois and eastern Iowa areas, but the gist is that for many people across the midwest and southern United States this year, springtime was an especially noisy season.
Saccata Quartet mimic the moment through rattling noise, rasping strings or buzzing drones which beyond any mass hatching event or the scrabbling of aged limbs up through the earth conjure such everyday phenomena as the trembling of telegraph wires, bicycle bells and the clinking of chains or the hump and drag as an unfortunate rider deals with a flat, porch chimes which have lost some of their lustre and flies or other insects which, like the cicada on the album cover, might wilt and nestle in the window sill after bumping and whining repeatedly against the pane.
Cutting a swathe through free jazz, noise and drone plus dark ambient while embracing the humdrum, on the album opener ‘Uh Oh’ the creaking of a staircase gives way to the sound of somebody steadily tearing apart a tool shed, clanging against corrugated metal or clambering over hot sheets of the stuff with an attendant singeing or scorching of hairs and other body parts. As the sun fades from the sky and the labourer seeks respite in a propped-up wheelbarrow, even in the dusk there’ll be no respite from the heat of the day.
The droning ‘Hmm’ filters its tinny fanfare through the flickering screen of a cathode-ray tube television set and ‘Umm’ sounds like a pile of junk filling up a canyon before whinnying strings, bowed and scraped and clattering percussion with clopping cymbals up the tempo, the track gaining intensity like the trundling wheels of a steam engine which threaten to careen off the rails, ending up where it started, back down the same chasm. And the closer ‘Oh OK’ does finally wind things down through its slow patter of chimes and cymbal rolls.
