It’s not uncommon for the sounds of a saxophone – perhaps a soprano, certainly an alto and a tenor too as it flits through its upper registers – to be compared to a series of bird calls, whether we’re talking about long flowing runs, staccato squawks or antiphonal call and response passages. Sometimes the effect seems deliberate, like on Horizons Held Close by Evan Parker and Matthew Wright for their latest excursion as Trance Map or on Aloft where Natsuki Tamura’s trumpet soars or scrabbles furtively in the vicinity of Satoko Fujii’s more lyrical keys, both of which albums were released last year. And at other times those flighty or fowl-like resonances are merely one tone trapped inside of an electroacoustic mesh, one texture or thread within a knotty and variegated fabric.
On their new album The Sound of Raspberry however the duo of Tatsuya Yoshida and Martín Escalante seem less busy conjuring bird noises than wringing necks, though squeamish listeners need not turn away for the necks that they are wringing sound more like rubbery props than the real deal. Those rubber chickens with their stretchy necks and appendages are endowed with an array of squeaking devices, from angry squawks to rasping wheezes to what may even be called ‘the sound of raspberry’ in so far as it resembles the flatulence or insolence of blown raspberries, whether made with the tongue or more in the manner of a bilabial trill.
Still the album opener ‘worldless vocals’ on The Sound of Raspberry sounds more staticky than rubbery, like whipping cords of electric. Then ‘six simple saxophones’ begets the record’s distinctive screeching and squealing, the sound of a thousand balloons letting out air. On ‘benign tenticulations’ we get our first overt vocals as the percussionist Yoshida and saxophonist Escalante blend death metal growls with the ruckus from an old Tom and Jerry cartoon, never setting aside their instruments as Escalante continues his squall and Yoshida pummels away from behind the drum kit while also contributing searing electronic treatments.
The Sound of Raspberry is undoubtedly one of the rowdiest albums you’ll hear all year, with its piercing and at times almost ear-splitting noise reaching a climax in the opening moments of ‘pierre clementi in belle de jour’, which refers to the actor who is best known for playing Marcel in Luis Buñuel’s erotic drama, a murderous crook. Elaborating their own sense of surrealism, more conventional saxophone squawks can be heard in the background of the piece, nestled somewhere behind all of the writhing and high-pitched electronics.
‘ruggerio y almendra’ offers a more staccato or pulsating variation on the general theme, but the duo never fall into what could aptly be described as a groove. The title piece ‘the sound of raspberrie’ opens with an evocation of conga drums and the uptempo singeli music of Dar es Salaam, which takes the patterns of taarab and ratchets the speed up to more than 200 beats per minute, as evinced by the Sisso and Maiko standout Singeli Ya Maajabu. After a few seconds of that we get our first blown raspberry, which is otherwise known as a Bronx cheer, plus similar tones which resemble a plethora of party horns or a pitch-shifted didgeridoo.
Yoshida and Escalante also offer up a few belches and a brief snippet of a bassline which finds the nexus between krautrock, early techno and later industrial developments, while ‘nature’s bottle service’ implies a good throttling at least until they slow everything down and introduce a mash of vocals, from Donald Duck duets to incipient operatics as the closing section of the track takes a more ritual bent.
That suggestive sense of ritual and heritage stretches from Andean flute music, traces of which can be heard at the tail end of ‘nature’s bottle service’, to the kabuki theatre of Japan, though when it comes to Yoshida’s guttural vocals the key reference is the progressive rock band rock band Magma, whose founder the drummer Christian Vander sings in his own fictional language called Kobaïan. In a similar vein the penultimate track ‘it’s time for the puppet show!’ offers parallels with Punch and Judy, outsized and multiplicious bunraku and Indonesian wayang before The Sound of Raspberry draws to a close upon one last blowout.
Somewhat remarkably, Escalante who plays a slightly modified alto saxophone uses no effects pedals or edits to produce the squealing and excoriating pitches which so define The Sound of Raspberry, a record of pure improvisation which almost mercifully cuts out at just under thirty minutes. On the other hand Yoshida’s synthetics and piano treatments come to the fore over the second side of the record. All in all it is delirious and skin-flaying and decidedly shrill, with the venerable Scandinavian noisemaker Mats Gustafsson – a Ken Vandermark and Peter Brötzmann collaborator who currently helms Fire! and The End plus the new ensemble Cosmic Ear – writing:
This is what we NEED! In these confused, populistic and fascist times – this is the JAZZ we need! URGENT! DEDICATED! RADICAL! Unique-face-peeling-cutting-edge-and-totally-in-your-face-MF! This is ALL we need for a better living! Think . . . Borbetomagus, John Zorn, TG, Masami Akita, Hanatarash . . . this is IT and yet, not at all alike!
The Japanese underground icon Yoshida is the founder and only enduring member of the progressive rock project Ruins, which from the outset was self-consciously styled after Magma as Yoshida’s vocals bore marked resemblance to Vander’s fictional Kobaïan. Kōenji Hyakkei offers another outlet for his engagement with Magma’s singular brand of Zeuhl, while over the course of four decades the drummer and composer has worked with a who’s who of Japanese psychedelic bands and jazz or experimental titans from John Zorn and Derek Bailey to Keiji Haino, Uchihashi Kazuhisa and Satoko Fujii as a longstanding member of the Satoko Fujii Quartet.
Escalante is a musician, photographer and filmmaker who hails from the Mexican state of Guanajuato, and is now based in Los Angeles having spent time playing in Peru, Norway and Japan. His incendiary trio recording Katyusha alongside Teté Leguía and Weasel Walter was variously likened to extreme metal, grindcore and noise rock or free jazz iconoclasts like the Machine Gun of Peter Brötzmann or Bäbi of Milford Graves, plus the flaying sixties and seventies performances of Masayuki Takayanagi. He has also featured alongside Otomo Yoshihide – another frequent Yoshida collaborator – and the grindcore band Sissy Spacek while he joined the Maranata duo of Dag Stiberg and Jon Wesseltoft for the salaciously textured but relatively melodic Ugly Euphoria from earlier this year.
Having shut down his old label Sploosh Records, the saxophonist is now unveiling a new undertaking called Wash and Wear. In fact The Sound of Raspberry headlines a slate of three releases on the new label, with Playing Harsh Noise on the Saxophone Since 2012 marking Escalante’s solo debut while This Molten Salt reunites him with the Peruvian bassist and New York transplant Teté Leguía and the Sissy Spacek drummer Charlie Mumma.
Billed as both a snapshot and a summation of his career to date, Playing Harsh Noise on the Saxophone Since 2012 features Escalante on his alto unadorned for more than thirty minutes, a feat of stamina (with one change of reed) from its first frantic gusts and buzzing undercurrents to its more squiggly and melodic passages, sparks flying and ducks squawking as he wrings out every drop from his instrument. Meanwhile the trio record This Molten Salt is laced with distortion from Leguía’s electric bass, as Mumma’s cavernous drums call to mind the garage rock or avant-garde primitivism of bands like The Fugs from the mid-sixties while Escalante’s untrammelled saxophone whips wirily all over the mix.
Recorded over several dates at disparate locations – the saxophone and bass of the album opener for instance were captured in Nashville, Tennessee in the fall of 2021 while the drum part was added three years later in Grand Rapids, Michigan – at times the rhythm section seems to attain a voice of its own, trance-like and glossolalic so that beyond their free jazz progenitors the trio sound like Cocteau Twins at their busiest or Boredoms at their shiniest. Sloshing like waves rather than summoning a wall of sound, on the middle piece ‘Impossible to Consider’ the saxophone is more sustained as the shredding noise reaches a fever pitch, while ‘Entity Grabbin” is more compressed and stifled, like an extreme amplification of a cleanup operation inside of a galley or canteen.
