DANIEL THORNE
Science and prog collide in this Australian-born artist’s solo debut.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN mathematics and music goes back at least as far as Pythagoras and his concept of the Music Of The Spheres, the idea that a theoretical – if inaudible – cosmic harmony is generated by the relationship of the orbits of the planets. JS Bach was fascinated by melodic inversions and numerological codes, while more recently Henry Cow’s Ruins contains sections based on the numbers in the Fibonacci series.
Australian-born, Liverpool-based composer Daniel Thorne, who also plays in the Immix Ensemble, and has just released his debut solo album, Lines Of Sight, is also interested in this area.
“I’ve always been very attracted to the idea of there being an overriding logic in the things that influence music and art,” he says. “And the way that patterns like Fibonacci spirals occur naturally in nature. I just wanted to play around with an idea of ratios without being overly explicit and rigid in adhering to it.”
In Thorne’s music the metric complexity often results from running different elements together. He loops his saxophones and also references the isorhythm technique, which originated in medieval motets, where the melodic part is a different number of notes to the rhythmic part.
“You get the same rhythm and chords coming by but where they fall with one another changes. It’s a great way of extending a small amount of material and I’ve always been drawn to that idea.” On From The Heavens he expands this idea further with the saxophone lines split into “different long-range polyrhythms”.
The album’s title comes from the idea of perspective, of zooming out and looking at, say, the overall shape of a river, while also being aware of the currents within the water. What’s remarkable about Thorne’s conceptual ideas is that they describe almost exactly how the music sounds. And it has both lyrical and more objective qualities.
“I think an artist should be speaking of their own experience as a human being and reflecting that,” Thorne says.“But music can also have beauty and meaning and feeling in the same way that you can be stirred by looking at a beautiful landscape. It’s more what you project onto it.”
As regards the Terry Riley and Philip Glass comparisons, Thorne concedes that, “They are very understandable and make sense,” but he cites American composer Julia Wolfe of Bang On A Can and saxophone quartet Battle Trance as being far more influential, and particularly the Alaska basedcomposer John Luther Adams.“He uses lots of ratios in his music and it sounds like nature, it sounds like planet Earth.”
To promote Lines Of Sight, Thorne is embarking on solo live performances, using processing, distortion and tape delays but no backing tracks: every single sound starts out from the saxophone.
“A lot of the music I will perform isn’t actually on the record,” he laughs. “But I enjoy improvisation and that approach isn’t particularly compatible with music that is rigorously constructed. Whether or not that all holds up I’ll have to let you know!” Mb
“I’VE ALWAYS BEEN VERY ATTRACTED TO THE IDEA OF THERE BEING AN OVERRIDING LOGIC IN THE THINGS THAT INFLUENCE MUSIC AND ART.”