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Returning to the records just once or twice to transcribe melodies and take notes on timbre, Dylan Henner reinterprets Raymond Scott’s three-volume set Soothing Sounds for Baby, whose iterative minimalism has been regarded as a precursor to the works of Brian Eno, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. Kevin Richard Martin and Joseph Kamaru juxtapose the Western museum archive with African oral traditions and rituals on the dusty and saturated Disconnect, while with the suggestively titled ‘Elephant Song’ the Norwegian chanteuse Susanna draws inspiration from Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, ‘struggling with her breathing’ over prepared piano and the smudged squeals of saxophone and bass clarinet, on a theatrical piece which concludes with a rapt swell of kettle drum and strings as the singer repeats ‘We don’t know what will happen in the end’.
Daniel Carter, Matthew Putman and Federico Ughi have partnered many times over, perhaps most prominently as members of the Telepathic Band whose far-out improvisations both exemplify and augur the 577 Records catalogue, yet over three long tracks Stream of a Dream from their March performance at the New York Forward Festival marks their first outing as a trio. Part of the latest batch of four on the curatorial platform Longform Editions, the composer Sarah Hennies responds to a large pond of frogs who emerge every spring behind her house in the Hudson Valley village of Red Hook, collaborating with the bass clarinetists Madison Greenstone and Katie Porter whose reedy drones commingle with mating noises and other outdoors sounds, before the plunging moans and hammered bass drums of the second half of Standing Water gradually surge into percussive eddies and foghorn blasts, with a coda of cowbell.
Experimenting with col legno and pizzicato, modelling their music on the joyous repetitions of Terry Riley who has been instrumental in their approach to ‘non-hierarchical’ sound, the progressive string ensemble Halvcirkel evoke Nordic landscapes from the streets of the Danish capital to snowswept Iceland at winter time and Swedish forests and lighthouses plus the small village where the violinist Bettina Marie Ezaki has a summerhouse. Nubya Garcia embarks on an Odyssey with the incandescent and winding ‘The Seer’, while Enumclaw the bona fide ‘coolest band in America’ return with an anthem for personal and interpersonal change.
And a lovely sloping bass line accompanied by the tremulous reverberations of Kirk Schoenherr’s guitar carry us through the final moments of Spencer Zahn’s live residency with the Brooklyn experimental series Unheard, as the soft pastel brushwork of Savannah Harris on percussion and Alfredo Colón’s placid gusts of alto saxophone support the ‘thank you’ message, capping the efforts of three modular chamber groups which were assembled by Zahn to cast a wide net, covering everything from seventies spiritual jazz to eighties fusion and nineties ambient electronics.
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Daniel Carter, Matthew Putman and Federico Ughi – ‘Tease-breeze’
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Sarah Hennies – ‘Standing Water’
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Halvcirkel – ‘Sænk Kun Dit Hoved, Du Blomst’
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