Main Drag Improvisers Series: January 10, 2024

 January 10th kicked off the second year of the Wednesday series at Main Drag with three trios and two quartets. Despite some common threads of personnel, instrumentation, and even form between the sets, this was another night of five different worlds built by unique combinations of equally unique improvisers.

I had been particularly looking forward to the first set, featuring guitarist Gian Perez, electric bassist Tete Leguia, and drummer Nick Neuburg, all players with highly personal styles of extended techniques. Their combination of prepared guitar, prepared bass, and prepared drums produced many soundscapes of satisfying bizarreness. However, they began linearly without any “preparations”, though all had switched to the noisy side just a few minutes in. The whole set was full of these rapid shifts, but few felt abrupt; often one player focused more on lines while the other two were noise-ing, and vice versa. The bowings, scratchings, sticks between the strings, foam blocks rubbed on the drums, and all the other instrumental modifications were like a filter of absurdity rather than a visit to a separate dimension. These players always stood out from each other texturally, but this was ultimately a tight trio with well-timed dynamic ups and downs.

Though Nick Neuburg stayed on stage for the next group - another guitar-bass-drums trio - this one had a completely different vibe. Luke Rovinsky on guitar and Caleb Duval on acoustic bass kept up a sparking, crackling edge with plenty of effects pedals. This was a very loud set; in sustained peaks of volume the drums were lost in all the voltage. I appreciate the catharsis in this kind of playing, but hearing it live was definitely a bit overwhelming. Relief came when Rovinsky and Duval took a more percussive approach, resulting in fractured interplay with nothing too loud to hear. One of these percussive moments happened right at the beginning of the set. Like the previous trio - and another featuring Duval that I’ve reviewed earlier - this group held back a little for the first few minutes and then dug in. I wonder if this is a new form pattern that free improvisers are starting to fall into, like the “one more short one” at the end that everyone was doing back around 2016-18.

For his first trio of 2024, Stephen Gauci was joined by regular bassist Adam Lane and drummer Kevin Shea. One of today’s most unmistakable voices on the drums, Shea brings a steady stream of high intensity to this lineup. He certainly reacts to what Gauci and Lane are doing, but instead of punctuating their lines the way Colin Hinton does, he often lays down a roiling surface for them to clash and wrassle over. Shea makes his fair share of unexpected choices too; at one point this time he dropped out right as Gauci and Lane reached their climactic screech and skronk zone, leaving them to duke it out as a duo. Gauci switched to clarinet for this trio’s second episode; he blows just as wildly and brightly on this instrument as on tenor sax. What began as a would-be woody interlude soon escalated to the high harmonics, with the clarinet’s higher fundamental kicking things up yet another notch. Then Gauci was back to tenor for some extra fury before a clangorous Shea solo.

Both the fourth and fifth lineups were quartets: sax, guitar, electric bass, and drums. Tenor saxophonist Michael Eaton, guitarist Max Kutner, bassist Adam Minkoff, and drummer Nick Anderson got right into it from the start, no holds barred. This group’s sound was always more texture than line, in both loud sections and soft. Kutner was at his noisiest, constantly getting into goofy timbral shenanigans. Eaton, with his multiphonics and shredding, managed to sound just as distorted as the guitar and bass. Though this quartet unleashed a lot of chaos, there was plenty of clarity here as well. The first half had a well-defined form, from blasting to ballad and back to blasting; in the more fragmented second half, everyone’s gestures were clear despite the densely overlapping ideas.

Any time Kevin Shea and guitarist Sandy Ewen are playing, things are guaranteed to get unhinged. In the last set, things certainly did so - in a particularly alien way with the presence of Welf Dorr on alto sax and Jeong Lim Yang on bass. In this quartet, melodic and non-melodic approaches combined in the kind of way that always fascinates me. Dorr and Yang largely stuck to pure melody, while Ewen, always the prepared guitar specialist, stayed resolutely noisy. With so much linear vocabulary around her, it seemed that at any point Ewen could suddenly break into lines or chords even though she never did. On the other hand, any time she started playing after dropping out for a while, the sax and bass became that much more textural by association. At first Shea joined the fray with his signature river of rolls and rattles, but halfway through the set he hit a funky groove that turned the proceedings into straight-up No Wave. From then on it was one party beat after another, with varying degrees of sax and bass engagement while Ewen chirped and croaked away with her springs and scrapers. The last seven minutes were filled with a fun blend of No Wave, bossa, and pop punk that could only have been fueled by Shea. The very end spiraled out of control when Yang joined Ewen’s droning with her bow (in fact all three electric bassists tonight used a bow at some point!), but ultimately Shea got the last word, winding the tempo down by himself.

Watch the whole show on Youtube!

Dogs Of Pleasure - Embrace

 

Embrace

As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, I am fascinated by islands of all kinds. I would say that just as their isolation leads to unique ecosystems, there is something about islands that affects their music as well. Embrace by the free-improv duo Dogs Of Pleasure (Julius Schwing on guitar and Alfred Jackson on drums) is a great example of an album informed by a different sort of mindset than one raised on the mainland. This is music of triply insular origin: Schwing and Jackson are based on Bruny Island, a relatively tiny sliver of land off the southeast coast of Tasmania, Australia. I’ve heard Tasmania described as feeling like “the edge of the universe”. The sounds of Embrace are certainly sounds of the edge - raw, rugged, unforgiving, combining scavenged bits of influences washed up by the tides to create something not quite like anything I’ve heard before. 
This is a heavy album, with a wild energy from start to finish. If the dogs referenced in the band name are pleasant, they are certainly not docile. Schwing’s distorted guitar howls and snarls, and Jackson’s drums charge and lash out all over the place. For all their noisiness, these improvisations are far from pure abstraction. Schwing’s shredding is often exaggerated out of melodic vocabulary with a deep blues or folk foundation. Schwing and Jackson form a tight duo to boot; they always seem to be listening closely though rarely mirroring each other. There are not a lot of different sounds on Embrace; Schwing and Jackson doggedly focus on a specific sonic palette throughout the six tracks. This focus is part of what makes the album particularly insular for me, like the limited-but-strange biodiversity of small or remote islands.
The first three tracks “Release The Hounds”, “Quarry”, and “Stretchmarks, Pigtails, And Bloodlines” stay in a concentrated earspace of aggravated guitar and flying drums. Schwing steps things up yet another notch speed-wise on the shortest track, “Buzzcut”, with playful up-and-down shredding. “The Bagman” is the only track with a groove throughout; it’s a feral, overdriven free-rock jam with a folk-singer lyricism shining through in Schwing’s lines. Despite its volume this one is really the album’s “ballad”. Then it’s back to the brutal zone for the final “Embrace”, this time with Schwing droning apocalyptically over almost-blast-beats from Jackson. Like the previous track this one stays in a single key throughout. The metal qualities in “Embrace”, as well as the rock/folk sound of “The Bagman”, show that this music is not easily classifiable “free jazz” but rather a monumental adventure through and beyond its component genres.
Immersive and visceral, Embrace is full-body music. Far from being alien in its remoteness, it sounds like right now in all its complexity. Schwing and Jackson are feeling what they are playing with the same intense connection that I’m sure they have to the wild landscape of their island. When I finally make that trip to Australia I hypothesized about in an earlier review, I’ll be sure to visit Bruny Island and compare my own impression with what I hear on Embrace.