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TO BUY THE CD PLEASE VISIT:
earshots.bandcamp.com/album/high-laver-reflections

Four improvised pieces recorded at All Saints Church, High Laver, Spring 2019.

This CD is released as a coproduction between Earshots and Matchless Recordings" matchlessrecordings.com

A quote from the CD sleeve notes about the recording session at All Saints Church, High Laver:

"...The main reason for being here was to return after recording with Eddie the previous year for his solo LP Matching Mix (all tracks but one on that LP were captured in this 12th century building); and to continue the project we had set ourselves - but had run out of time - during our first visit. Back then we discussed the possibilities of a mutual release, hence this Matchless-Earshots collaboration, which underpins a long standing fellowship that we are privileged to be a part of."


REVIEWS:

Todd McComb: www.medieval.org/music/jazz/
John Eyles: www.squidco.com/cgi-bin/news/newsView.cgi?newsID=2353


Todd McComb, Medieval.org
www.medieval.org/music/jazz/

Now returning to electroacoustic improvisation in the UK, High Laver Reflections — recorded in "Spring" 2019 at All Saints Church in High Laver Essex — involves a distinctive pairing of AMM legend Eddie Prévost (percussion) with the Earshots duo of Edward Lucas (trombone) & Daniel Kordik (modular synthesizer). And Earshots is not "only" a musical duo, but also a concert series involving a variety of well-known performers (although previously unknown to me), and had recorded a Prévost solo album in the same church in October 2018, Matching Mix (already released on the Earshots label). High Laver Reflections is then a followup involving the duo: Whereas Matching Mix had involved an exploration of percussion resonance in the space of a church, the trio take that basic impetus to a new level via soaring trombone lines & more subtle (or low-pitched, but not always) electronic reverberations — still accented by rattling percussion.

Indeed the first track provokes a strong sense of ritual, sometimes recalling the quintet on AAMM (discussed here in June 2018) with its "Unholy Elisabeth" also originating in a church, but with Tilbury's tinkling piano usually evident amid a more crowded palette of players.... In other words, High Laver Reflections involves a tighter "musical economy" — for whatever that's worth — but does also seem to feature Prévost that much more distinctly.

The "ritual" first track can then be quite compelling, recalling e.g. Tibetan styles with deep moving resonances & lines of flight in what ends up being a rather similar sound combo. (What is otherwise objectively strong dissonance comes to sound distant or even mellow? This combo creates its own ambience....) It's a relatively short album, though, even as it does seem meaty, and turns to other styles:

The second track morphs from long horn calls into a more typically "choppy" improvised mode, and in the process comes to sound more like a shimmering trombone trio per se, already relatively soloistic & coming to drag for me with static roles....

The third is actually the longest track, and suggests a sort of outdoor music, a squawking jungle (or maybe even e.g. a barnyard, sometimes not so unlike Disputa e Guerra... as just discussed here in September...), meaning that it doesn't really seem to involve the space of the church much anymore.

And the final, short track involves some big drums in what seems like a taut & lively "anthropological" summary. That's more compelling again, less consistently layered, but still doesn't recall the opening — which I continue to hear as the most captivating.

Anyway, I'd be interested to hear them elaborate that style — or something else they might do to make a more coherent overall album, rather than an exhibition of styles. (And despite being concatenated across multiple sessions, and despite these observations of difference, High Laver Reflections does still yield a sense of transformative continuity... a sort of "de-Christianification" of rite, I suppose.)

The Earshots duo/series is also something to watch in general, with Lucas already being involved e.g. in performing spectral music (i.e. as briefly suggesting a sort of Scelsian mysticism here...).

17 November 2020

---------------------------

John Eyles, Squid's Ear
www.squidco.com/cgi-bin/news/newsView.cgi?newsID=2353

Eddie Prévost is the renowned drummer who was a founder member of the legendary improvisation group AMM, back in 1965, and remains the group's only ever-present member. In November 1999, Prévost set up a free improvisation workshop, which met once a week in London, welcoming interested musicians to turn up and improvise together. (Only the arrival of Covid-19 and its attendant lockdown halted the workshop's unbroken run, a few months after its twentieth anniversary was celebrated; all associated with it anticipate the workshop to reconvene once it is safe to do so.) Over those first twenty years the workshop was attended by well over five-hundred players, with weekly attendance numbers ranging from three up to the mid-twenties. Countless musicians progressed from attending the weekly workshop to playing regular gigs across the capital. Two long-standing members are electronicist Daniel Kordik and trombonist Ed Lucas who met and bonded at the workshop and, in 2013, set up their Earshots label. Like all who attended the workshop, they also met and bonded with Prévost, hence this album.

In October 2018, Kordik and Lucas had recorded Prévost playing solo, the resulting album Matching Mix being released on Earshots in June 2019. That album was mainly recorded in the twelfth-century All Saints Church at High Laver, near to Prévost's home in Matching Tye, Essex, the acoustic quality of the space having drawn all three to the church. In spring 2019, Kordik and Lucas returned to High Laver to record a trio album with Prévost, once again attracted by the church's acoustics. The album — jointly issued by Earshots and Prévost's own Matchless label — comprises four tracks, totalling forty minutes, which are heard in the order in which they were played in the church.

The appropriately titled opener, "Chancel, Nave, Tower", begins with a sound which has practically become Prévost's trademark, the resonating ringing of a bowed cymbal; across the album, he employs a wide range of sounds and techniques, conventional and less so. Once Lucas' trombone and Kordik's synthesiser have made their entrance, the three engage in the type of collective improvisation which typifies the workshop, being based on listening, searching, and responding sympathetically; the results are not obviously led by any of the three, but are produced collectively. None of the instruments is consistently predictable, all of them producing atypical non-stereotyped sounds throughout. Crucially, though, the sounds that they do produce always complement one another perfectly. Just as miraculously, the album's four tracks are distinctly different, each one making satisfying, exhilarating listening. First rate improv. Unconditionally recommended.

credits

released October 5, 2020

Eddie Prévost: Percussion
Edward Lucas: Trombone
Daniel Kordik: Modular Synthesiser

Recording and mix by Kordik / Lucas
Master by Rupert Clerveaux
Drawing by Billy Steiger
Photography by Jean Prévost
Layout by Daniel Kordik

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Daniel Kordik Bratislava, Slovakia

My music spans across three main domains: electronic music, free improvisations and field recordings. This page lists almost all my solo albums, regular and one of collaborations.

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