Lunar Love

Posted by admin on March 4th, 2007 filed in music

I love the Star and Shadow. It is freezing in there this time of year, but the whole place vibrates a friendly warmth.

Last night Paal Nilssen-Love came to town. Whenever I listen to him I feel sick because I don’t play the drums as much as I should. My limbs twitch a little, wanting to be able to make the sounds I’m hearing. I Love It When You Snore, his record with Mats Gustafsson, changed how i thought about the drums, about improvising. Slaps and dingers, unapologetic, punchy with no regrets. There is punk in there, I hope he played in a hardcore band. Absolute precision along with dedication to dirt and guiltless filth. In a low patch he injects the sound of seriously ill bird, born inside out; polystyrene tormented between a bow and cymbal.

photo by Conor

Fugazi are the only other people who do this to me; this music creates a tension in the gut, the feeling of inspiration, of shock and awe to thought, and the horrible feeling that I’ve got it all wrong, that I should have stayed a drummer, pushed the band, toured, lost money, got lost, met people, lost more money….

Saxophones. What is it with sax players? perhaps the sound is so synonymous with jazz that I don’t hear anything else. Gustafsson and Lol Coxhill got over it, shuck that god awful sound, moving beyond the ego beamer that the sax becomes in the hands of such evil doers. Even Evan Parker falls foul to the tenor’s temptation. On soprano I am amazed by him. In performance he will stand unmoving for an hour, the body in line with the instrument. The sheer restraint of every impulse attains the perfect flowing tone. Absolute control of the breathing apparatus allows for an unending counterpoint. It is perhaps as each note, phrase or gesture emerges that we witness the exhibition of native thought in sonority, in the ephemerality of improvised sound. The clusters he produces give a dematerialized body to thought, sounds which, as Deleuze put it, pass through the body but find their consistency elsewhere. In improvisations he can be heard steering performance yet almost going nowhere, more a real-time composition than anything else, an iterative process. There is an audible programme at work in his playing, to which he always returns. This dedication, the repetition and development of material (as tenacious as, and completely different to, that heard in Fu Manchu’s records) is understood as the path that leads to perfection. “Hang on I think I’ve heard this one before”, yes, but it’s just that bit more beautiful than last time. This is worlds apart from what I admire in Nilsen-Love and Gustafsson’s playing, where restraint repeatedly lapses in submission to the body’s impulses. But when the tenor comes into play, it marks, in my experience, little more than the abandonment of all that I admire in his playing. Last night was no exception; Ab Baars repeatedly obliterating the micro tones coming from Henneman’s viola. I could have used the courage to hand out a dead leg…. Today I am going to sell my saxophone in protest to this kind of playing.

The night is wrapped up as everyone exits onto coquet street to watch the lunar eclipse.