Scott Wollschleger – Between Breath

The self-styled brontal composer Scott Wollschleger whose music the pianist and critic Ethan Iverson has described as ‘Morton Feldman meets Thelonious Monk meets H. P. Lovecraft’ emphasises glitchy repetitions on his latest chamber suite, which comprises three duos and one solo. Suggestive of a faltering ambiance, whose dolorous transgressions and violences are charged with a characteristically animated sense of fun, through the fractured micro-intervals of Between Breath collaborators run rampant or lurch expressively in the shadows while machines break loose from their shackles, only to bump into one another or stumble haplessly within the encompassing mechanist hum.

The first part of ‘Violain’, which features the andPlay duo of Maya Bennardo on violin and Hannah Levinson on viola, opens tentatively beyond the first tremulous thrum, with muffled fast-bowing techniques offset by stubby plucks before the second movement steadily ratchets up the tension. Described as ‘the musical version of the scream I felt inside my head’ at the time of composition, the title track surges to life through full-blown horror movie caustics, a skittering mass of creaking doors, gaping mouths and consuming drones, the keys of Anne Rainwater running headlong down corridors or pacing anxiously on tiptoes, always with a pair of eyes in the back of the head, while the menace comes by way of William Lang’s sputtering trombone.

Wollschleger and Lang have dubbed the result of the trombonist’s overpressure technique on ‘Between Breath’ a ‘dirty split tone’, while after reaching inside of her instrument, at the halfway point Rainwater’s piano turns achingly pensive, conducting a kind of elegiac search party with the pianist peering out from a lighthouse while a muzzled trombone snarls through thickets down below. ‘Anywhere, where threads go, it all goes well’ carries the same atmosphere while introducing a voice which seems to linger on the cusp of the beyond, a siren or selkie perhaps or a snatched glance from some other creature at the bottom of a dank hole, with Nathaniel LaNasa behind the piano and Lucy Dhegrae singing soprano as queasy clusters on the pitch pipe add to the permeating moistness. According to Wollschleger, the elliptical text for ‘Anywhere, where threads go, it all goes well’ stems from a fake John Ashbery tweet, via a social media account falsely attributed to the late American poet.

‘Secret Machine no. 7’ then plays out like the limpid aftermath, with a wiry violin whose melodic ark ekes upwards before starting over again, a little bit glitchy, slender and tenuous like a pair of tweezers plucking at the filaments of a thread. Concluding the album with a solo from Miranda Cuckson, for this piece the low G string of her violin was tuned down a minor third to E while a metal mute was attached to the bridge, facilitating in the words of the liner notes ‘delicate fades to niente’. Around the halfway mark tremolo smears, dizzying three-dimensional pizzicato and scudding slides wash across the screen, as sublimated and contemporised baroque airs take on the impish character of a picaresque. Then in the last moments of ‘Secret Machine no. 7’ these squibs burst forth and scamper deftly over the horizon, as Between Breath lets go of the what goes bump in the night horror theatrics, embracing the shimmer of Annihilation, a science fiction freak.