Trace Sphere

| Gathering Rains | Kimnara nara016

While this music is improvised, master-drummer Simon Barker ‘composed’ the band, assembling the collective brilliance of Korean Pansori singer Il Dong Bae, guitarist Carl Dewhurst, pianist Matt McMahon and trumpeter Phil Slater. Meanwhile the shakuhachi offerings of new addition Riley Lee are as right as white clouds against a blue sky, so that Lee almost seems the missing link in the project’s evolution. Barker has conceived of a series of smaller groups interacting within the sextet, and the ineffable sadness of the shakuhachi helps glue Bae’s searing contribution to the surrounding gentler music-making, just as Barker’s drums and percussion do in a very different way. All is poetry on what is surely one of the high-water marks in Australian spontaneous composition, and has been vividly recorded and glowingly mastered. The ultimate master of this approach was drummer Paul Motian, and Bro uses the ex-Motian bassist Thomas Morgan and the other great expressionist drummer of the last four decades, Jon Christensen, as his collaborators. The latter has an exquisite feel for colour and drama, Morgan makes a magnificent sound and grounds the music emotionally, and Bro maintains a constant dialogue with these twin halves of his conception. (tenor, clarinet), Magnus Broo (trumpet), Ingebrigt Haker Flaten (bass) and Hans Hulboekmo (drums) create sophisticated sagas where the lines between improvisation and composition are blurred as if by a white-out. With no horizon, lost notes dance enigmatically and give you the shivers, and when those notes coalesce into teeming numbers and the full force of the band is unleashed, you fear for the integrity of your loudspeakers.