Tag: Improvisation

The Doomed Bird Of Providence – Metoric Heralds Of Danger

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I have an awkward relationship with graphic scores. On the one hand, I can’t read music, so the idea of an alternative way of providing instruction to musicians that doesn’t use traditional notation really appeals to me. On the other hand, I find them utterly baffling. I can’t ever figure out what they’re trying to convey, whereas sheet music has at least a sense of order (unless you’ve ever tried to decipher one of Charles Ives’s scores). All of this is irrelevant because I can neither read music nor play an instrument anyway, though I find it pretty easy to follow the score for John Cage’s 4’33”…

I mention all of this because the fifth album from the London-based The Doomed Bird Of Providence makes use of an especially bewildering graphic score. “The scores are circular in shape,” writes Mark Kluzek (accordion, bass, glockenspiel, percussion). “They are split into rings which are the stages of the composition. The performer moves from the centre, outwards, through each ring and responds to the symbols assigned to them. The symbols are prompts suggesting a certain way of playing…”

I’ve followed this collective for a number of years. I’ve always found their semi-improvised music leans into a sort of sea-shanty style mournfulness, and in fact the first album of theirs I ever wrote about was inspired by stories from the sea. The jumping off point for Meteoric Heralds Of Danger was an 1874 prison novel by Australian novelist Marcus Clarke, For The Term Of His Natural Life. All the titles contain a nautical reference reflecting the fact that Clarke’s book details the horrendous treatment of a man transported by boat to Australia, his punishment for having been accused of committing a crime.

There is a curious sense of finality and hopelessness to these pieces, reflecting the fate of a prisoner doomed to spend the rest of his days in a penal colony. There are, however, moments of somewhat muted joy. The recurring violin and viola refrains by Joolie Wood and Rachel Laurence on ‘Darkly Rolling Waves Flashed Fire’ and the otherwise apocalyptic title track are two such relatively hopeful moments. Kluzek’s stirring Parisian bridge musician accordion on ‘A Long Low Line On The Distant Horizon’ is another.

There are four long-ish improvisations using the visual scores here, augmented by four shorter composed pieces. Without watching the musicians interpret the score in the studio, you’d be hard-pressed to know which was which apart from the lengths. Taken as a whole, Meteoric Heralds Of Danger is a remarkable collection, and exactly what I’d expect from them.

Meteoric Heralds Of Danger by The Doomed Bird Of Providence was released March 20 2026. With thanks to Mark.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2026 Further.

Huntsville – Bow Shoulder

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Bow Shoulder is the stuff of near-legend. The album documents a 2010 impromptu improvised recording session at the Chicago studio of alt. country stalwarts Wilco following a gig the prior day by Huntsville – the Norwegian trio of Ivar Grydeland (electronics, electric guitar, acoustic guitar and pedal steel), Tonny Kluften (electric bass) and Ingar Zach (tabla machine, drone commander, drums and percussion) – that saw them sharing a bill with Wilco percussionist Glenn Kotche’s On Fillmore side-hustle, and which saw both Kotche and Wilco guitarist Nels Cline hop on stage for the Hunstville encore. 

Convening at Wilco’s Loft space on June 29, presumably because Cline and Kotche happened to have the keys, the Huntsville players entered into a lengthy session that saw the already formidable five musicians augmented by Kotche’s fellow On Fillmore partner Darin Gray (bass) and keyboardist Yuka Honda. Edited and mixed ten years later by Grydeland at Oslo’s Amper Tone studio, Bow Shoulder consists of four lengthy pieces ranging from a svelte seven minutes to a expansive twenty, each one displaying diverse tonalities and a seamless, highly perceptive interplay. 

‘Side Wind’, which opens the collection, is like a gathering storm, a landscape full of sonic tension – scratchy guitar sounds, the kinds of wild yet totally controlled effects that Cline manages to weave into whatever project he is hired onto, tabla percussion, long, droning notes and the outlines of melodic gestures. There is movement and progress here, but little by way of pay off. Around eight minutes in it feels like it might suddenly blow over into a thunderous psych-motorik groove as a tight bassline nudges itself forward, but that would be too obvious for Huntsville & Friends; instead things subside again into a tense quietude but a sense of hypnotic, trance-like forward motion remains. 

Each piece is different from the next, but yet somehow utterly inseparable from the whole. The most significant departure arrives on ‘Lower’, wherein a more muscular interlocking between Zach and Kotche produces intense bursts of rhythm and subtle percussion gestures, upon which are heaped growling, whining feedback, distorted countermelodies that recall Cline’s pal Lee Ranaldo, long, fluttering echoes and grubby electronics. There is a feeling here of loops unspooling into the void, their final resting place a dense, impenetrable web of murky, thrilling noise, the whole piece finally arriving at a brooding, rhythmic intersection of menacing guitars and incessantly pounded drums. 

This is a mesmerising artefact born of chance encounters and shared aesthetics, of intense musicianship and the symbiotic power of seasoned improvisers playing off one another. 

 

Bow Shoulder by Huntsville (with Yuka Honda, Nels Cline, Darin Gray and Genn Kotche) was released September 25 2020 by Hubro. 

Words: Mat Smith 

(c) 2020 Further. 

John Chantler / Steve Noble / Seymour Wright – Atlantis

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Atlantis is the second album from electronic musician John Chantler’s vibrant trio with drummer Steve Noble and alto saxophonist Seymour Wright. Their first, Front And Above, was recorded at Dalston’s Café Oto, the Ground Zero of London’s improvised music scene and the birthplace of many new and sonically challenging collaborations, including Wright’s ongoing work with Noble and his GUO unit with Daniel Blumberg. Their first album with Chantler was heavily edited to draw out a focus on its emptiest passages, whereas Atlantis’s feisty declaratory aura bespeaks a wildness that was more or less intentionally scrubbed out from Front And Above in the manner of Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased De Kooning sketch

Not that this is just some on-the-spot spontaneous date lacking any sort of overarching vision: though Atlantis was recorded and mixed in a single day (24 January 2018) at the very Stockholm studio space that ABBA once called home, it was preceded by a week of intense trio rehearsals at the Fylkingen arts space in the city and a smattering of gigs in Norway. Listening to the three pieces presented here, that time spent in each other’s company creates a sort of seamless, highly responsive intermeshing of the three musicians, threaded through which emerges a kind of restless, gripping energy and tension.

A key ingredient in pieces like the twenty-two minute ‘Class I – A Single Entrance Created From A Gap In The Bank’ is a sort of power drumming that’s often absent from improvised music, where the emphasis is more frequently on balance, texture and abstract percussive pointillism. Some of the impact here comes from the studio itself, where the space’s dynamics created a rich, natural reverb that loaned itself to a heavier form of playing. Many of the most thrilling moments arrive when Noble works himself into a cyclical frenzy, the response from Wright being a howling, guttural tone and through which Chantler weaves elastic drones and grimy extraterrestrial splinters.

Introspection also emerges elsewhere in that piece’s passage. A delicate tipping point arrives in the middle five minutes involving what sounds like tuned percussion interacting with a shimmering, enveloping blanket of lyrical synth tones and an engaging high-pitched whine like compressed air escaping gradually from Seymour Wright’s sax. When the piece inevitably builds back up toward its denouement, it is led by Chantler’s synths becoming restless and as angry as a swarm of irritated hornets, inspiring a heavyweight percussion response and angry saxophone growls.

Atlantis by John Chantler / Steve Noble / Seymour Weight is released January 16 2020 by 1703 Skivbolaget.

(c) 2020 Further.