Mats Gustaffson & Christof Kurzmann -
Falling And Five Other Failings
Mats Gustafsson: slide, tenor, baritone and bass saxes, piano mate
Christof Kurzmann: ppooll, rubberband, voice and live processing
Recorded May 14 and 15, 2015, by Martin Siewert at Garnison 7, Vienna
Mixed and mastered September 8 and 9, 2015, by Kurzmann, Gustafsson and Siewert
Produced by Kurzmann and Gustafsson
Graphic Designer: Jimmy Draht
out on CD (and soon to come on LP, Limited Edition, Silkscreened):
Trost (TR154) - http://www.trost.at/
-->
Sounds in Response
During the 1970s, Susan
Sontag and Marshall McLuhan had the insight and foresight to correctly anticipate
a future permanently altered by photography (Sontag) and the internet
(McLuhan). There have been many, many social and cultural developments in the
last forty years, and not all of them have been as forward thinking as Sontag
and McLuhan. Looking at the state of global politics in 2016, the idea that
there has been social progress in the last four decades seems, at best,
questionable. And, in retrospect, it would seem that the intersection between
adventurous art and music with mainstream society was much more common in the
1970s than today.
In general, two art
forms central to the cultural development of the 20th century—the cinema and jazz—have followed the conservative direction of contemporary
politics. Using the United States as an example—it
is impossible not to be disappointed by Hollywood films being made now,
particularly when compared to those made forty years ago (The Conversation, Dog
Day Afternoon, The French Connection, MASH, The Last Detail, Dawn of the Dead,
Taxi Driver, Badlands, A Clockwork Orange, Two-Lane Blacktop ...); and it is questionable if the
perception of jazz as an open-ended art form, rather than a musical style, will
ever recover from the neo-con movement that began during the Reagan era.
Today's creative impetus often seems to be more concerned with replicating an
idea of the past instead of pushing against it.
There are certain
individuals, however, who have concentrated on what has actually been
developing outside the (now global) mainstream during the last decades, artistically
and otherwise. Christof Kurzmann and Mats Gustafsson are two of these people.
As musicians, they have remained focused on contributing to the contemporary
scene, always looking for new ways to challenge themselves and to develop
original methods of construction for their work.
One result of their
research is this set of duo recordings. I find them to be statements that
indicate ways in which it is possible to make music that belongs to this epoch
and not the last. On the surface, its fundamental components seem to come from
the 20th century: the saxophone (invented in 1846, but not coming to the fore
until jazz and Coleman Hawkins took a hold of it), the laptop computer
(initially developed around 1980), and tape music (first started around 1950).
But when examining the materials it becomes quickly apparent that, though the
"machines" may belong to the previous century, the methodologies
applied to them do not.
The six pieces on this
album began as open improvisations digitally recorded at Martin Siewert's
studio in Vienna, Austria. A section of each improvisation that was considered
most successful from a musical standpoint was "spliced out" and kept
as a composition—the studio was used as
a means to produce a performance rather than to strictly document, not usually
the case when recording improvised music. Mats Gustafsson (who also plays
electronics here) has added to the range of extended
techniques for saxophones instigated in the 1970s, by musicians like Anthony
Braxton, Evan Parker, Roscoe Mitchell, Trevor Watts, Steve Lacy, and Peter
Brötzmann. He's developed these through his unique approach to the instruments,
which is often built upon phrasing power that can stand up to rhythmic
frameworks and volume that frequently have little to do with the origins of
improvised music. In many cases, the grooves explored on this collection of
recordings are about pulse, but not the rhythmic feel of jazz, nor the timing
of late 20th century free improvisation. And as Christof Kurzmann (who also
sings here) explained to me, the instrument he plays is not the laptop, but the
software that he runs on it, called PPOOLL and refined by Klaus Filip and
Arnold Haberl in 2008, as a reworking of their earlier LLOOPP software. Put
simply, PPOOLL gives Christof nearly infinite manufacturing possibilities for
sound—from creating new material that's
used later in performance, to processing sonic events in real time.
The elements of
construction used to make this album and the resulting music all belong to this
century, to this period. I think it's clear that Christof and Mats are not
looking backward in an attempt to recreate something that sounds like the past,
nor do I feel that they are attempting to be futuristic and artificially
avant-garde. falling and five other failings
is a set of music that responds to the circumstances that we are currently
living in, what we are seeing and listening to right now. Compositions for the
times. As I hear them, abstract hymns for the left as we are faced with the
advance of the right.
