Time of the Season
Olivia Block, Archie Shepp
I spent this past weekend in Lisbon attending the second edition of Causa Efeito, a new festival of improvised music organized by Pedro Costa of Clean Feed Records. As is usually the case when I make such trips, the time I usually spend on this newsletter is seriously reduced, so this week’s offering is more modest than usual.
Olivia Block Transforms Her Music, Again
The work of Chicago sound artist and composer Olivia Block has always provided new ways of hearing. Her music has never remained within one aesthetic model for too long, but her attention to detail and her innovative methods have been constant for more than 25 years. In fact, few artists have revealed such an instinctive approach—one that entrusts the maker’s own ears and aesthetic sensibilities to explore new terrain from an ever-shifting assortment of raw materials. Early on I held great admiration for her ability to blend environmental recordings with sounds forged either in the studio or produced by instrumentalists in a way that constantly questioned what the listener was actually experiencing. I’ll never forget a sound installation she presented in the Fern Room of the Lincoln Park Conservatory, where the natural gurgling of water within the greenhouse was complemented and contradicted by her own synthetic production. Most of the time her sounds blended seamlessly with the noises made by the small streams within the space, but then the balance would shift, with a rising tide of white noise, and the careful listener suddenly wondered if what they were taking in was real or artificial.
Block has moved well beyond that particular focus over the years, perpetually shifting to other concepts and source materials. Still, none of that quite prepared me for the turn she’s taken with her new album The Mountain Pass (Black Truffle), in which she uses her voice to create an elusive song-like suite that reflects upon the man-made degradation and damage of our natural world, particularly the impact upon wildlife in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico, where Block spent time at a horse sanctuary after recording powerful collisions of her own piano playing with the drumming of Jon Mueller at Electrical Audio in Chicago. Block has always shrouded her own work in an aura of sonic mystery, and that remains the case on the new record, where her poetic lyrics lean toward abstraction rather than spelling out her concerns.
I was initially surprised by Block’s delicate voice unfurling elliptical imagery on the brief opening track “Northward,” floating over spare piano chords as much as a second instrumental element as a narrative presence reflecting on seasonal change and migration. Although I have often spoken with Block, this was the first time I ever heard her sing. The encounter with her voice is brief, washed away by a brook of burbling synthesizer, bleeding into the powerful “The Hermit’s Peak,” where electronic sounds suggesting a prepared harpsichord chime and tinkle until they’re abstracted into a wavering swell of sound eclipsed by more melancholic piano playing. As the piece evolves the chords come into focus, building up momentum and a melodic structure, entwined with some lovely meandering electric piano lines, for the entrance of Mueller and trumpeter Thomas Madeja. The stately piece uses accretion and subtraction until it gradually erupts in tumult—the calm before the veritable storm—building from Mueller’s spacious playing, which adds volume and density to his improvisation until it explodes in a furious, gut-punching attack complemented by a chorale-like cluster of brass. Check it out below.
“Violet-Green” introduces a decidedly melancholic air, with Block singing a gorgeously descending melody over elegiac piano accompaniment and sustained organ tones, as she asks, “Will I see you again next year,” a hint of the uncertainty that climate change has visited upon even the most remote corners of the earth. As the piece winds to its conclusion the measured tone is pierced by visceral electronics, reinforcing the sense of chaos and instability that led an endangered Mexican gray wolf to travel some 500 miles from its natural habitat in New Mexico into Arizona in 2022. Block’s lyrics are written from that animal’s perspective, and its assigned name, “f2754,” provides the title for the album’s fourth piece, an instrumental toggling between sepulchral and vaguely triumphant—an interpretation that could be colored by my own desire for glimmering hope. The album concludes with the shimmering “Ungulates,” a kind of benediction that elides any clear judgment or prediction. This newsletter is geared toward live music happening in Berlin—and here’s hoping Block will present this work here in the near future—but she will perform the music in Chicago on Thursday at Constellation, joined by Mueller, Madeja, and Adam Sonderberg on keyboards.
Track of the week
Earlier this month I heard tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Tobias Delius perform in two very different contexts, reviving his long-running improvising duo with drummer Christian Lillinger and interpreting a new set of music composed by bassist Antonio Borghini for the sextet Banquet of Consequences. Both performances only reinforced my belief that there’s no better improvising saxophonist in Berlin than Delius. But this week’s track is actually by a musician who has clearly influenced him, none other than Archie Shepp. During Delius’ duo set I could hear plenty of Shepp and one particular phrase reminded me of the incredible title tune from Shepp’s 1967 album Mama Too Tight (Impulse!), which mashes up the funk of James Brown with Latin boogaloo. The experience led me to revisit the excellent album, which sounds as good as ever. Check out the tune below, where the remarkable drumming Beaver Harris creates the heart of the stuttering, strutting gem, which also features Charlie Haden on bass, Tommy Turrentine on trumpet, Grachan Moncur III on trombone, Howard Johnson on tuba, and Perry Robinson on clarinet. In some ways it’s an outlier for Shepp, but in another context it first right in his knack for subverting pop trends of the 1960s and reinventing them in his own voice, as he famously did with “Girl From Ipanema” a few years earlier.
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
May 28: Lea Bertucci; crys cole, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
May 30: Zuli & Omar El Sadek pres. λ (lambda); Ludwig Wandinger, 8 PM, Kuppelhalle, Silent Green, Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin
May 31: Erlend Apneseth Trio (Erlend Apneseth, Hardanger fiddle, mora harp; Stephan Meidell, guitar, electronics; Øyvind Hegg-Lunde, drums, percussion), 8 PM, Jugend[widerstands]museum Galiläakirche, Rigaer Str. 9/10, 10247 Berlin
May 31: Olga Reznichenko Trio (Olga Reznichenko, piano, Lorenz Heigenhuber, double bass, and Maximilian Stadtfeld, drums), 8:30 PM,
May 31: Magda Mayas, grand piano, Elena Kakaliagou, French horn, Els Vandeweyer, vibraphone, 8 PM, Terzo Mondo, Grolmanstraße 28, 10623 Berlin
May 31: Ohrenschmaus (Lina Allemano, trumpet, Dan Peter Sundland, electric bass, and Michael Griener, drums), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
May 31: Laurel Halo with Leila Bordreuil and MFO; Chuquimamani-Condori, 9 PM, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Linienstraße 227, 10178 Berlin
June 1: Michael J. Schumacher; Bryan Eubanks & Kaffe Matthews, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
June 1: Soko Steidle (Rudi Mahall, bass clarinet, Henrik Walsdorff, alto saxophone, Jan Roder, double bass, and Oli Steidle, drums), 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
June 1: DEGEM FH80: Folkmar Hein zum Geburtstag (with electronic works by Hanna Hartman, Natasha Barrett, Ludger Brümmer, Beatriz Ferreyra, Clemens von Reusner and Trevor Wishart), 7 PM, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin
June 1: Quentin Cholet, drums, Jeremy Viner, saxophone, and Felix Henkelhausen, bass, 8 PM, REH, Kopenhagener Str 17, 10437 Berlin
June 2: Peter Ehwald, alto saxophone, Stefan Schultze, piano, and Tom Rainey, drums, 8:30 PM, Jazz Club A-Trane, Bleibtreustraße 1, 10625 Berlin
June 3: Erasão Percussion Trio (Mariá Portugal, percussion, voice, Emilio Gordoa, percussion, electronic processing, Burkhard Beins, percussion, electric bass), 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)