Camila Nebbia & Patrick Shiroishi “The Human Being as a Fragile Article” (Trouble In Mind, 2021)

Even if improvised music is a niche since it’s very beginning in the 1970s, nonetheless it gained attention in every part of the world – this is also the main reason this blog is written in English: to give the best visibility to this music to all the people interested in it – so different scenes rose up all over the world. In the past I wrote for All About Jazz about an avant garde scene in Istanbul, and few months ago I reviewed on this blog a CD collection of experimental music coming from Mexico.

But those of you who are more keen on tasting different dishes with their own ears maybe are familiar with musicians like Kaoru Abe and Yosuke Yamashita from Japan, as well as Ibrahim Maalouf from Lebanon or Vijay Iyer from India. So, what I’m gonna do with this article, is to present you a couple of younger improvisors who gave life this year to a beautiful cassette now out of print but available to your listenings through the Bandcamp website.

The first improvisor featured in this cassette, titled “The Human Being as a Fragile Article”, is multi-instrumentalist and activist Camila Nebbia. Nebbia comes from Buenos Aires, Argentina, but recently she has moved in Stockholm, Sweden. Devoted to free improvisation, electronic music and mixed media (mostly super 8 film, archives and digital video). Nebbia is co-creator and curator of a collective interdisciplinary group and of a concert series. 

In her website I can see a huge amount of artistic collaborations I’m completely new to, so I think I’ll map them in the future. Her artistic companion in this cassette issued very recently is Patrick Shiroishi, a Japanese-American multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Los Angeles who, this year, has released other different and interesting material: from Hidemi, a solo album where he give life to a tribute to his father, also musician, Hidemi Shiroishi, through a multi-layered instrumental construction, to the more approachable album Natsukashii where he leads a quartet.

It’s not easy to find out resources on similar musicians along the World Wide Web and this is the reason I think it’s important to document their music in spaces like this one. Let’s start with the music, so. The first piece is called Un Nino Llamado Cuervo, opened by distorted saxophones intertwined the one to the other creating an intimate, meditative but urgent atmosphere. The second piece, El Ser Human Como Un Articulo Fragil, the title track, sees the spoken part introducing every sonorous fragment more linked to the music, which is a little bit more lyrical making me think about some of the early Braxton compositions. 

Al Costado De Los Recuerdos, with its seven minutes, its small percussions, bells, pre-recorded birds, crossed by a ghostly, delicate melody and some interspersed scratches. Olvido is introduced by small metal percussions and voice, bringing the horns in the background at the very beginning before a more peer to peer dialogue, while Mi Pies Son Tan Fuertes Como Mì Corazon is constructed on small blows and again a spoken part in the background. Mentiras y Silencio is based on continuous, subtle but assertive little lines on the horns with fragments of field recordings giving life to something I can visualize as a fire burning around the horns themselves.

El Espacio Entre El Lenguaje features percussions, horns and an almost far away chant, whereas the following short Terra Seca and Apagar El Televisor are based respectively on faster saxophone lines – again, derivative from Braxton language as far as I can hear – and squealing, honking horns remembering some experimental stuff from the 1990s of John Zorn. Finally, it’s the turn of the longest composition/improvisation on the cassette, the more than 11 minutes long Mientras El Cisne Blanco Se Eleva Al Cielo, No Deja Rastros Acà Abajo, full of raucous notes, shorter, deconstructed statements, meditative atmospheres, fragments of voice, of pre-recorded sounds like the resonating sounds of a Sitar, other effects, giving me the impression I was right in finding an inner atmosphere to the music I was listening from the beginning. 

In a way, listening to this music, I found myself at the far left of a spectrum of experimentation based in a world full of TV series pretending to give us instruments to our thoughts, and struggling and revolts who don’t resonate that much in our Western media, asking myself if I’m dreaming when I think of this music as derivative from a well defined ‘fire’ but more keen on looking at a well determined inner space. Obviously, we can say that starting from your inner self is the best way to rise up your own consciousness, but I miss that highly formal experimental statements from the 1970s as a way of telling the world ‘the hell with your common sense and wisdom, I’ll fight for a wider - and not a better – world’.

I’m not saying this music has a too much confrontational quality. It is confrontational and experimental as far as this world we’re living allows it to be. And this is the big deal. But one deal we can afford only listening better to records like this one and trying to confront this music with the one from the past, in order to understand better the different worlds they were created in. Paradoxical as it is, I think there were better information, in quality, in the pre-internet era. Now everything is accessible, but not only the good informations. But this is maybe another problem, and will talk about it another time.