Waiting: submerging oneself into a suspended
half-existence for the benefit of some anticipated event or eventuality.
A fundamental basis of civilization, it is the only legal form
of torture. Some people spend their entire lives waiting, deferring
the living of these lives in the possibly deluded belief that
they will one day receive the reward of popular respect or salvation
(the two being different forms of the same thing). They believe
they are only meant to have one role, one label in life, so they
refuse or simply cannot recognise any good-natured offer of camaraderie
(a beer, a game of poker, a trip to the beach). They inadvertently
isolate themselves as a result, and often delve further into their
goal-directed abstinence in an attempt to make good on their original
investment. This can be an anguished existence; one characterised
by a distorted experience of slowed, unreal time and dimmed sensory
perceptions. In other words: the civilised individual exists in
purgatory.
As initially unappealing as it sounds,
Norwegian saxophonist Torben Snekkestad deals with this diminished
state on his latest album ‘Conic Folded.’ Over the
course of 11 tracks of ascetically patient avant-jazz, Snekkestad
and his two collaborators (Jonas Westergaard on bass and Jon Balke
on piano) somnambulate their way through unsettled meditations
on the incomplete and secluded self. Using fractured refrains
and overwrought runs that are like jerky grabs for a personal
quality that always eludes, they play a music which is uncompromising
in its honesty and languor. ‘September’ sets the scene
perfectly. Broken piano chords and a smooth yet morose sax take
a halting walk down an empty street. Guided by an almost catatonic
bass letting out soft single notes at a snail’s pace, they
exhale a narcotic haze that is potent in its evocation of stunned
confusion and existential uncertainty. Their approach is extremely
measured and impactful; Snekkestad allows notes to hang and drift
like unnaturally drawn-out sighs. His playing, modal and continually
searching, is obscure and gloomy in its mood, and it never once
finds a comforting resolution or a steady harmonic rhythm.
Much of ‘Conic Folded’ follows
this disturbed and disquieting non-constitution, with the 8 minute
‘Icon’ proving especially foreboding and dolorous.
But the trio take several changes of tack here and there that
keeps things interesting. ‘Zobob,’ running at a lean
three minutes by comparison, is a much peppier affair with nimble
interplay and all but energetic spurts of piano and saxophone.
The brilliance of the piece however is that even though its pace
and density is much increased, it still manages to maintain the
same jarring and discontinuous motif thanks to its choice selection
of dissonant notes. Then there’s the album’s title
track, which plays out like spinning schizophrenic episode for
the first two and half minutes, whereupon Snekkestad’s crazed
solo sax slows down to be joined by a shuddering, convulsive piano
that becomes more portentous as the piece nears its end. Its weirdness
is matched by the penultimate ‘Undercurrents,’ a perturbing
experiment in using what sounds like a prepared piano and possibly
a prepared sax to produce a cacophony of buzzing and reverberating
noise.
And
that is ‘Conic Folded.’ The album has no groove, its
music has little flow, and it certainly has nothing in the way
of a conventional melody. Instead Snekkestad and his colleagues
deal in a palpable atmosphere of lack and disruption, the feeling
of being lost to a static and vaguely traumatised state of mind.
They play jazz for anyone who clings onto impossible dreams, those
that have only really ever caused harm and spiritual desolation.
If they can master such obsessions, then maybe so can we. (Simon
Chandler)
For fans of: Messiaen, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, John
Coltrane, Jimmy Giufre.
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