Ben Goldberg “Eight Phrases for Jefferson Rubin” (BAG Production Records, 2021)

When last week I was listening to a clarinet in a concert of contemporary music, I was hit by how much dissonant this instrument was in that context, so I fully understood Eric Dolphy, one of my favourite multi-reedists, when he tried to be as scratchy as he could on bass clarinet. Above all, even if he studied the style of music I was listening to in that moment, his roots were dwelved into blues. So when I first listened to Ben Goldberg, I was in a way deeply fascinated by his touch.

But let’s start with a little bit of order. In the last issue of an italian magazine devoted to jazz there is an intriguing review of Goldberg’s last album, Everything Happens To Be, featuring a well known rhythm section to my readers: Michael Formanek on bass, Thomas Fujiwara on drums, plus the architectural guitar of Mary Halvorson. I didn’t wanted to review it since few time ago I wrote about Goldberg’s companions in full, but I promised to myself to spend some time listening to his music.

Ben Goldberg is an incredible musician. He studied with Pauline Oliveros and in some way her sensitivity matched perfectly with that of his pupil, as we will see during this review. During the lockdown Goldberg lost all of the concerts he was supposed to play, and so he started developing a musical diary published through his Bandcamp account. But this year he released a couple of intriguing records: the one with the trio mentioned here above, featuring also Ellery Eskelin on tenor saxophone, and an older album of previously unreleased material that will be the heart of this review.

The album is titled Eight Phrases for Jefferson Rubin. Rubin was an intimate friend of Ben Goldberg, a sculptor that curiously enough for a certain amount of time lived and worked in my own country, Italy. Sadly he passed away after an accident with his pickup truck. The music featured in this album is recorded by Goldberg on various clarinets, plus veteran Larry Ochs on sopranino and tenor saxophone, John Scott on guitar, the basses of Lisle Erris and Trevor Dunn, and Michael Sarin on drums.

The first things that came to my mind, even if it can seem a superficial description, is that Larry Hochs plays his sopranino saxophone, as an example in a piece like the initial Problem, as Steve Lacy was playing his own soprano: lots of edges, staccatos, various techniques used in order to give his instruments not a raucous but that quality of a tense sound, as typical of a music coming from jazz and an instrument whose lack of roundness need the players to be solved.

Obviously Goldberg is not playing here the part of a Steve Potts, with that characteristic stream of consciousness, but he is respectful of the atmosphere created by his pals and by his own decisions as a composer: an intense, meditative but not intimistic mood that can be related to what happens after a tragic loss. In his book Sud e Magia (South and Magic) anthropologist Ernesto De Martino described how music was used in south of Italy to help people to avoid madness after the death of a beloved parent, but in a way Goldberg’s music is intended to avoid concepts and actions related to catharsis.

Plain of Jars is, again, introduced by a saxophone whose melodic and harmonic structures will be for sure well known to the fans of the Rova, even if here there’s something different from the typical impetuousness of a quartet of reeds and a more direct orientation to explore all the possibilities of the instruments. Silence is a compositional tool widely used in this piece of music, and the single players are able to fill it with a respectful creative tension.

The piece titled Visited sees a unison of reeds and arcoed bass, and a consequent tension transmitted also through the dialogue between the other bass and the drums. Guitar weaves a dramatic and expressively urgent canvas, while the crescendo of the other instruments dramatizes music in a magistral use of distortion evoking the ghost of a Ronald Shannon Jackson. The clarinet behaves consequently, but the tension and release program sees the music reaching some peaks just to leave the soloists an aptly space of expression.

Eight Phrases, the other ten minutes long composition on the album, start with a clarinet statement added with sparse drums here and there. After, soprano saxophone crawls while the clarinet takes the role of the drums and the bass give the composition his right pulsation. Then a clarinet solo and another duet with the soprano leave space to some syncopated brushes and a bass texture, that after a while sees also the intervention of a gentle guitar. Another reed dialogue closes the piece.

Brace and Bits sees the clarinet sneaking out through the drums figures, rapidly substituted by a guitar solo. Drums and guitar continue together until clarinet and sopranino draw some lines at the horizon, depicting a vivid landscape. After some drums figures, guitar harmonics and the clarinet close. With Elements, it is time to leave some space to bass and sopranino, intertwining so well that the drums give only a few gentle brushes hits to add some little spices to the music.

Lost Touch sees Ochs mastering his tenor saxophone through a melody whose structure is well known to the lovers of jazz tinted with contemporary music, and the assertiveness of the tutti creates a dramatic bridge to the tenor’s wild, finally releasing the tension, assertions. All the instruments are finally living the opportunity to express themselves in a wild context, lowering the volume but not abandoning their creativity to underline the clarinet solo.

It’s time to close, and Snow is perfect for this purpose with his guitar melody: it’s like a night coming after a full, troubled day. This record can be the perfect introduction to a figure, that of Goldberg, and I invite you to recover also his debut with Kenny Wollesen in the Klezmer Trio, his compositions for Steve Lacy and the album by avant garde guitar hero Nels Cline New Monastery. I think one of the most satisfactory things about jazz and contemporary music is that when you meet a new pal, you really want to see how he behaves in different context: here there’s a new occasion to that.

 

 

 

Eliane Radigue "L'Ile Re-Sonante", Milano, Auditorium San Fedele, 09.20.2021

The Auditorium San Fedele is near the Duomo of Milan, and it’s also near a good great library. Not that far there are some small restaurants for ‘i Milanesi bene’ (the Milanese bourgeois) so it is good to be able to breath some fresh air thanks to the music. But before to start, a little bit of context – yes, more.

Every year the above mentioned Auditorium organizes a review of various artists coming from electronic music and contemporary music called Inner_Spaces. This year, thanks to the Covid, the guys were not able to create a real review, organizing different concerts before a given date, so the only thing we as externals knew was that on September 20 and 21 there would be a performance of the precious piece of music L’Ile Re-Sonante by Eliane Radigue.

The masterpiece of drone/ambient music by Radigue was introduced by a couple of shorter pieces of music by the younger composer David Monacchi, born in 1970 and disciple of Salvatore Sciarrino. Monacchi is developing since 15 years a project called “Fragments of Extinction”, where he exposes the sounds taken directly from nature (e.g. the sounds of the Amazon rainforest) in an attempt to preserve its purest sound forms.

First Monacchi piece was Stati d’Acqua for fields recordings (taken along the Tevere, the river of Rome, but also from a scanning of a six month foetus and the resonance of the fluid of a human body), while the second, part of the above mentioned Fragments of Extinction series, featured the sound of the rainforest in Brasil. If Monacchi research on site is remarkable, I can’t completely enjoy the result, even if it is not bad.

The way ‘real’ sounds intertwine themselves with electronic sounds, as an example, makes me think about the clarinet and the tape recorded dialogue in Stockhausen’s Stimmung, but the result here is that of a mere flux of the ones into the others and viceversa. Something we have listened to for about ten years at least. The way also Stati D’Acqua terminates, with a slow lowering of all the sounds, without any apparent reason, makes me think of a compositional cul de sac the composer didn’t took seriously.

But I have to admit it, it is difficult to mix the will to create a meaningful sonic environment, with the desire to report the climate crisis we’re all living: there’s a comunicative urgency in Monacchi that overwhelms him as a composer maybe. Or maybe it just me wanting from a soundscape the same complexities of contemporary music.

Things don’t go that much better with L’Ile Re-Sonante by Eliane Radigue. I think we have to deal, for once, with the given definition of the music: “drone-ambient music”. Yesterday night I heard very clearly all the drones, but it was not ambient music. I heard description of this work of music everywhere as a music created to impregnate discreetly the environment in which it is played. At the opposite, yesterday the volume was very high, at a point the structrure was resonating clearly and distinguishably.

I heard almost a long, prolonged piece by Sunn O))) maybe, instead of a composition by Eliane Radigue. I’m joking a little, but that was the feeling anyway. The good thing was that the drones were clearly audible, initially as a human heartbeat slowly beating, then the air was full of different textures the one mutating into the other until I was able to distinguish, with time, three different sonorous landscapes: the first drone movement, then a bunch of female operatic voices, then again another drone.

Two things came to my mind: the work of Mark Rothko, or at least a music transposition of it, and the Vipassana Meditation – I mean, the music was creating the right environment for it, so I closed my eyes and started a Vipassana myself. More prosaically, L’Ile Re-Sonante is the highest compositional point of Radigue as far as her work with the ARP 2500 synthesizer, and the best possible union of the different roots Radigue was referring to: European composers of noise music (Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari) and the american noise minimalists like Rhys Chatham, or Pauline Oliveros drone music.

Nevertheless the ‘acousmatic direction’ I have depicted, the work of Radigue is one of the most brilliant and important composers in contemporary music. I still hadn’t the opportunity to listen to her most recent stuff – I know she’s encountering several musicians to discuss the sound dynamics of their instruments composing music ad personam – but I’m sure it will be interesting in the future to immerse in her sound world. I so hope her research will be rewarded by brilliant results.  

 

 

Olivier Messiaen “Quartet for the End of Time”, Milano, Teatro Dal Verme, 09.16.2021

The best way, for someone unfamiliar with contemporary music, to start listening to this genre is undoubtely, in my opinion, the Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen. Its vivid melancholy mixed with open meditative trascendency is something everyone can deeply appreciate. The story behind the composition of the eight movements is impressive too.

So, even if sometimes I listen to this work of art on my PC as many other music, I wanted to give it a deeper listening, and when I knew that there was the opportunity to listen to the Quartet live in a concert hall, I bought istantaneously the tickets for me and for a friend who never listened to contemporary music but that was deeply fascinated by the work and its performers.

More prosaically, the Quartet for the End of Time was created by Olivier Messiaen when he was a soldier in the French army fighting against the German Nazis during World War II. Hostage in a concentration camp, he mediated with a party official to leave him free to write some sheet, and since there were three other musicians in the camp, in 1941 Messiaen and his new friends were able to perform for the soldiers and the prisoners.

Messiaen music is full of references to carnatic music, the sacred music of the south of India, but transposed into a system he called ‘modes of limited transposition’ along with other elements taken from his first serial works. Also an ornithologist, he tried to convey the sound of birds into his own music. He said he was able to perceive colors while listening to sounds – a phenomenon known as synesthaesia – and so one of the goals of his music was to allow people to listen to colors: the second Quartet movement, as an example, is intended to give the listener the sensation of yellow and light blue.

As previously written, the music of the Quartet is divided in eight movements, some ensemble music and some solo music – all the instruments except the piano. The four musicians at Teatro Dal Verme yesterday afternoon were flawless, and this helped for sure me and the huge group of other listeners to enjoy the music. Giovanna Polacco is a talented violinist who studied at the Conservatory of Milan. After, she gain an impressive number of awards and played under the direction of Abbado and Karajan for a long time.

Clarinetist Sergio Delmastro started studying piano at a young age, then he passed to composition at the Turin Conservatory; after a huge number of recordings for Stradivarius, BMG and MGA (Paris), he started teaching composition at the Conservatory of Lugano. Nikolay Shugaev won his first prize as a cellist at the age 13, the first of a long series, and curated a long theory of first executions of authors like Fine, Falcon, Rosenblatt, van Geel and others.

And finally, pianist, harpsicordist and orchestra director Antonio Ballista played in the last decades under the direction of Abbado and Boulez among the others, and he can claim to have the major authors of contemporary music writen pieces directly for him: from Berio to Bussotti, from Sciarrino to Sollima. He toured also with Berio, Dallapiccola and Stockhausen, and collaborated to concerts of Boulez, Cage and Ligeti.

A deeply fascinating journey into the idea of time and transcendency, the Quartet is also full of references to contemporary philosophy. But, surprisingly, the way the musicians interacts the one with the other and intertwine the one with the other will be not unfamiliar to the usual reader of this blog. I’m not obviously saying that Messiaen music is similar to jazz, but that even if this is written music there’s almost an interplay in the way the parts are conceived in relation to the full scheme.

While the clarinet solo is what the words say, a solo of clarinet with all the other instrument muted, the solos of cello and violin are provided with a minimum of interaction with the other three players, giving life to some interesting small dialogues or conversations that can be intriguing for a lover of free improvisation. It’s not a surprise that many composers of free jazz or experimental music are taking this type of contemporary music seriously while studying. 

In the end, if you take in consideration the last works of Roscoe Mitchell and you think about it as a zen kind of music, with the sonorous masses as statements instead of being the developments of a given theme, something similar can be said of Messiaen music, whose praises to the eternity of Jesus and the consequently reflection on time are very tied to Mitchell’s. Sometimes, the difference between genres are only a matter of temperature. So, my final advice is: enjoy the music, wherever it comes from. 

 

Joelle Léandre / George Lewis / Pauline Oliveros “Play As You Go” (Trost, 2021)

In my to-be-rebuilt-from-zero collection of albums (it’s a long story, I won’t narrate it here) there are live records released years after their public executions. The beautiful double ECM “Bells For The South Side” by the various Roscoe Mitchell Trios (Mario Gamba wrote on the italian newspaper Il Manifesto that these compositions stand in Mitchell’s carnet at the same point of Beethoven’s Ninth) was recorded in 2015 but released two years after. And the dream album by pianist Cecil Taylor, one of my favorite composers&performers of all times, “At Angelica 2000 Bologna” was issued on 2020.

Something similar happened with Peter Brotzmann’s sessions for the saxophone solo CD “I Surrender Dear”, sessions that belong to the year 2018 and published only two years later. So I asked myself if there is one reason that, after a long period of time where alternative music – whatever this label means – was about to instantaneously monetize creativity, now after all these years artits are going slower with the publishing of their own music, sometimes bringing to light hidden gems that were at risk of becoming only a small portion of a vast archive.

Things have changed in the business. If ten years ago a good decision was to give birth to a limited edition of 1000 copies for one album – since it would have been difficult to sell more than that at the beginning of the European economical recession and in the middle of the cultural crisis of the new century – now artists and labels, if we’re talking of passed away musicians, are more aware of the link and the responsibilities they have with their public, and the few of us that didn’t leave completely in order to become adults with no strange sonorous objects in their houses want more than the next great album to add to our collections anyway.

In order to respect the up above tracked rules, here it comes an album that will leave you with the will to listen to it repeatedly, or so I hope at list becaue it’s what it deserves. The musicians involved in this live recordings are three of the most important masters of instant composition and improvisation of the last decades. We’re in effect talking about bassist and vocalist Joelle Léandre, trombonist and electronic manipulator George Lewis, one of the founding members of the AACM, and accordionist Pauline Oliveros. This is the first time they play together.

The 44 minutes long instantaneous compositions begin with Léandre raucous vocals interspersed with accordion and electronic effects. The interaction is obviously different from that of a ‘jazz’ trio since the way the musicians listen and react to each other is based on reprocity more than on idiomatic techniques. Bass is both pizzicato and arcoed, and even if it is difficult to tell who’s conducting the dances, I would say that Léandre gestures are kind of the skeleton for Lewis’ and Oliveros’ flash, at list in this first part.

It can seem obvious since the nature of an instrument that is designed to be pivotal but not that obvious from the nature of the sound structure of the improvisation-composition. And if a colleague from his blog wrote aptly that the way every musician is open to the other is fundamental for the creation of the music, I would also suggest the listener to be careful with the group indentity of it, an identity that can seem overwhelming the single musician but pertaining to the ensemble.

Around minute 8 the electronic elements mastered by Lewis give space to various accordion statements, intertwining with them, dialoguing with them, leaving them the space to become an abstract, far away melody mixed with bass’s percussed and arcoed strings. We’re about minute 12 and the trombone takes its place in the usual manner: statements of existence instead of melodies or trasfigured melodies or scarred melodies. It’s time for the voice to dialogue with these statements, while the trombone become less dense and more careful to the dynamics of sound and silence.

It’s time again, at around minute 15, for the accordion to gather trombone’s heritage and give life to a way of being, more than a way of improvising: the electronic sounds, in fact, articulate a range of different paths to music, leaving the listener the right space to live inside the music instead of being overwhelmed by it. We’re around minute 17 now, and this complex texture is held by trombone and bass: they build a climax that leave the listener with the famous Braxton idea of waking up spiritually the people who are attending to the event.

At around minute 19 electronics add themselves to the music, before a quasi-silent space where sparse sounds can accompany the positioning of the listener’s mind in the middle of the music itself. Accordion and electronics are now underlining the short and dense, but warm and gentle, statements from the bowed bass who takes the lead of the trio again, conducing it to a construction made of different textures sometimes echoing an exaltating full and sometimes leading to some full/void dynamics.

We’re around minute 25 and Lewis elaborates in real time Léandre vocals, before a short amount of silence interspersed with electronic sounds. Strings and short electronic statements dominates this second part of the performance, with vocoderized vocals and short accordion bids. A new climax by all the instruments can be taken as an invitation to leave yoursef go to the following mix of acoustic and electronic trombone’s sounds.

A new crescendo makes the music more dramatic, but it’s the non idiomatic quality of it that makes the listener live an experience of openness, of feelings, more than that of different identities contaminating each other. In a way, it is as this idea, that circulated throughout intellectual environments during the last decades, is now leaving its place to that of sensations mixing together in order to create a new, composite feeling, whose spirit is here represented by a sound that can seem that of a dramatic keyboard followed by small sound gestures levitating in the mind of the listener.

Small bowed strings lead the listener to a new electronic heartbeat, while far away small voices counterpoint Oliveros’ small accordion morceaux, until the apparition of what can seem a little percussion. Bass and accordion dialogue is following the pause with a mix of melancholy and expectancy, while the electronics try to remind us that this is non-descriptive music, and that this idea of sound is not for everyone to be played: you have to dismiss a previously frequented idea of ethics and aesthetics in order to do so.

Then, it’s time to the trombone to conduct the listener into a journey to be played as you go, and if the cover of the album is not far from that of other avant garde records where the sea is compared to the texture of sounds, this is the best version of it from Christian Fennesz “Venice”. Recorded in Prague at the Festival “VS Interpretation” for Czech radio, “Play As You Go” is an important album not only becase we miss Pauline Oliveros since 5 years, but also because this music is far from becoming surclassed in a period where we often can listen to musicians that are perched on melody or on a non completely textured experimentation.

 

Vasco Trilla "Unmoved Mover" (Fundacja Sluchaj. 2021)

There is people who made the history of improvised music and who is well exposed in the temple of criticism or in the pantheon of the mind of music lovers, then there are musicians who gave their entire life to find out new paths in articulating a personal language, and then again there are creative guys who want only to risk and give new lymph to a ‘tradition’, that of the avant-garde, and that therefore are taken by many people as redundant, while in fact they’re essential as the other cats.

Read what Andrea Centazzo said about Vasco Trilla, the musician we want to explore in this post: “Being one of the first solo percussion improvisers in the ‘70s, I paid special attention to Vasco work. This fresh music is a blossoming of ideas and sounds. Vasco is a minimalist in percussion, each sound is accurately chosen and explored to an extreme end. A world of larger horizons and open skies where the percussion trigger the most inner intense feeling in the listener”.

Born in Barcellona, Vasco Trilla started playing drums at the age of 19. Initially into progressive rock and metal, he developed an interest for improvised music, but this is really cutting short and I want to give you more cues on Trilla’s work. After all, knowing about one artist life and tastes can help in enjoying better his own art. So, the first thing I want you to be aware is that Trilla studied art history and was passionate about Polish and Russian cinema and music.

So he studied at university the movies of Wojciech Jerzy Haas, Andrzej Waida, Andrzej Munch, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, and Krzysztof Kieslowski while he listened to the music of Lutoslawski and Penderecki. On the other hand he was into the experimental metal scene of that country, with bands like Decapitated and Kriegsmachine. It is quite common for the younger generation of experimental musicians to be able to skim through such different sources of inspiration, and it’s good because you can develop your own voice made of fragments of different previous identities without belonging to anyone of those.

Between the many collaborations of Trilla you can find the names of Andrea Centazzo, Jamaladeen Tacuma, Cecil Taylor, Peter Evans, Marshall Allen, Lotte Anker, Wilbert de Joode, Mette Rasmussen, Ilia Belorukov, Axel Dorner, and this is only a small part. His last solo album is titled “Unmoved Mover” and it is issued by the label Fundacja Sluchaj. The seven minutes title track opens with small cymbals and noise interruptions here and there, but the intent of the music is to create into the listener a space where he can be aware of everything that happens as an event, as you can listen through some of the old and recent AEOC records.

Gongs and drumsticks rubbed against the cymbals give substance to the atmosphere with bold but delicate statements. Then a huge amount of small bells appear, giving the music some solemnity and the sacred tone it deserves. An openly percussive texture so to give the listener the feeling of a path through sound is experimented in Hylomorphism. Ousia is dominated by a more preeminent cymbals sound, and natural echo effects, while Living Bodies is constructed on a dialogue between thicker and denser sounds, before an explosion of little bells.

Nous – how many of you care about gnosticism or Philip K. Dick novels? – is more dominated by dynamics of sound and silence, leaving you with this presence of a vast unexplored space in your mind, where different volumes and densities of textures are also present building a fascinating climax, and if Hylozoism can seem only a subtle pause made of other bells chiming, Celestial Spheres is like listening to thunders and the natural elements in a primeval brew, interspersed with the sound of the bells.

We can get this way to the end of Causeless Cause, almost seven minutes of summary of Trilla’s art as a scultpor of sound through bells, a set of chimes activated in different moments, as if each one of them is giving life to the following. And while this album is becoming one of my favourite releases of the year, discovering my gentle side and knowing something more about myself, I can only recommend you to give Vasco Trilla the chance to become one of your favourite young players. 

 

Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp "We're OK. But We're Lost Anyway" (Bongo Joe Records, 2021)

In 2011 or 2012, when I wanted to quit writing (and I did for quite some years devoting myself to photography) I wanted to leave with a couple of articles: an interview with young Stefania ‘?Alos’ Pedretti (available on the italian webzine Mescalina) and an article about a young photographer (available on the italian webzine Culturame). But, what made me quit writing? It’s simple: the quality of the music I was listening to at the time.

Something was going terribly wrong. I listened to a lot of young musicians in London the year before and if I loved the ‘great old men’ of the avant-garde (Evan Parker, Louis Moholo-Moholo to name a couple) on the other hand I felt little or no empathy with the young improvisers or experimental musicians, with some notable exception. And I was feeling as Mr Jones (as in Bob Dylan song Ballad of a Thin Man, when he sings “And you know something is happening but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?”).

So my idea was: “I don’t know where the music is going, I know only it is going badly, in sad places, so I want to explore art as an artist in order to understand better, on my own skin, what’s going on”. So I did photography and then theatre for many years, and finally I came back to writing. It was not a dramatic come back. I was always putting a review here and there, even in this blog. But finally, thanks to a colleague, I found out the perfect album to talk about this lost decade. 

The Album is “We’re OK, but We’re Lost Anyway” (great title, indeed) by the incredible Orchestre Tout Puissand Marcel Duchamp. An italian magazine of music made me aware or these guys, and the first time I listened to their music through youtube – a mix, as Stefano I. Bianchi wrote on Blow Up, of ‘afrobeat, Ex, Stereolab, Folk, jazz’ – I felt this sense of melancholy and sadness that was not coming from the notes played by the musicians, but kind of ‘in between’ the music, but being the most part of it.

So I kind of felt that all the sadness for the lost of music – there are only few record shops left in my town where I can find CDs or vynils of free jazz, improv and contemporary music and I hate Amazon so there’s no way I’m gonna use it to purchase records, plus the last one was kind of a ‘lost’ decade: I mean, apart from few musicians, even apart from the musicians you’ve found during this years on Complete Communion there was not that much great music to listen to – was here, better said: instead of listening to a new record, I was listening to all the sadness of the decade. 

This is the best part of “We’re OK ...”. But before analysing the album, few words for the band. The orchestra has born in Geneva in 2006, thanks to the bassist Vincent Bertholet who basically wanted to give life to a group of musicians who could play together around Europe. Initially fueled by six players, the band during the years became a 12tet and now it is a band of 14 elements. The band has a kind of political consciousness that makes it very nice to my ears and heart.

“From Mexican Zapatists to Chiapas rioters, we stand aside every person who wants to destroy capitalism through the dismantling of great commercial empires in favor of local agricultural enterprise” states Bertholet, and this is really the less we can do in this world right now. But what about the music? After an introduction so heavy, the music has to be at least incredibly good. And it is, even if its best part for me is I won’t say ‘not intended’, but ‘unconscious’. 

The album opens with Be Patient, where an accordion lead the listener though his microtones and minimal melody to Bertholet patterns embellished with violins twirling around the bass. Then drums and horns enter. The atmosphere is full of rage, while we start listening to the voice. If I have to make a comparison, the last Portishead come to my mind. But the trombone and the guitar mumbling together comes from experimental music, and so memory goes to records for instrumental ensemble and voice like “Les Stances A Sophie” and “Raining on the Moon”.

Empty Skies shows us what drums and strings can do if combined together exploring repetition through different pitches. Voice sweetens the listener while guitar and strings develop a distorted unison that is possibly what made Bianchi, the italian journalist above, think about the Ex (accompanied by Tom Cora I guess). So Many Things (To Feel Guilty About) is based on the dynamics of a guitar counterpointing a vocal chorus. Drums give depth to the ensemble, vibraphone too as it takes its turn. 

Blabber, as I was hoping to hear, is opened by vibe and drums, plus cello and voice playing a game of underlines to which all strings add tasty spices here and there, while We Can Can We is driven by horns, cello and drums. The rhythm is undoubtely that of Fela Kuti’s music, with a guitar dipped into minimalism as the vibraphone. Flux is a delicate journey into a dream made of horns, voice and vibraphone, whereas guitar adds a punk rhythmic ad a certain point. Drum’s colors set on fire the male rap, again with the guitars developing a rock drama made of multiple grating.

Connected is a couple-of-minute-divertissement for chorus and guitar, Beginning, the last five minute track on the album is their first song I listened to in a live version you’ll find at the end of this review, and it is made of a rhythm mimicking the circularity of afrobeat with a minimalist guitar and multiple horns, percussions and strings to set the music on fire. It has that warrior spirit, but also that not intended but real melancholy I was telling you more above. But the silence is over.

The album terminates with the one and a half minute of Silent, the closing of the courtain with a pinched cello, strings, voice and the desire for an uprising. My dream now is to take the band to play a live concert in one of the many squatted centers in my town. Maybe, having some contacts, this will be possible in the future. It really would be the best venue for the Orchestra’s fire music and at the same time, the encounter point for an awakening of both music and people. Together.