Okay, so the trio of voice, bass and drums is hardly overused even within the wide open fields of free improvisation, but unity of purpose is a major characteristic of this set. A practical consequence of that is compelling music which, in a way entirely its own, has something of the Watts / Stevens line-up of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble about it. In both cases low volume doesn’t equate with low creativity, in fact quite the opposite.
As Gerry Hemingway writes in his digipak note for this set it’s sometimes inexplicable why three creative inputs go together, and whilst there’s no particularly stark example of the pertinence of that comment in this set, the lengthy Hunting Quarks gives it substance. A kind of precarious balance is struck for the duration of the piece, while the suppression of ego and the avoidance of flights rhetorical and otherwise ensure that the music is compelling.
Throughout its seven and a half minutes Subatomic Whisperings is a model of agreed restraint. Baumann hints at language without ever resorting to it, Rotzler, again with the complete absence of rhetoric, shows his command of augmented technique, while Kunzi’s periodic bluster almost tips the music over into abstract parody.
These collective avoidances serve to place the music in the context of a tradition the most overt characteristic of which is a kind of physical longevity, as opposed to the maintenance of a tradition in which the roots are constantly recycled, as it were, with no more than ever increasing refinement to distinguish between one generation and the next.
Buy Nucleons: Hunting Waves at leorecords.com or franziskabaumann.ch
Discography
Heisenberg’s Accident; Hunting Quarks; Spinning; Seven Lives; Chain Of Fools; Subatomic Whisperings (39.22)
Franziska Baumann (v); Sebastian Rotzler (b); Emmanuel Kunzi (d) Luzern, Switzerland, no date(s).
Leo Records CD LR 876