3 False Walls

Tiny Hairs Coldless	Uchihashi Kazuhisa / Gene Coleman Storobo Imp.	Molar The Time and Motion Studies

False Walls

The Chicago improv label False Walls is pretty young – six releases in a little over two years – but already this imprint seems to be finding a quirky and interesting identity for itself. Based on these three very different albums, that identity so far seems to be an insistence on viewing the concept of “improvisation” in a much broader context than is usually imagined. Within this catalogue, there is a heavy emphasis on the idea of improvising, as most broadly defined, without worrying about the actual style of music that’s spontaneously produced. It’s a refreshing approach, and these three low-key discs all provide their share of simple pleasures without being particularly striking or revolutionary on their own merits.

Coldless is the sophomore disc from the Chicago sextet Tiny Hairs (their debut was also the first CD on False Walls). Initially, there’s not much here to suggest improvisation at all. The group plays very tightly, in a vaguely rock-inflected mode that sometimes recalls meditative post-rockers like Jackie-O Motherfucker, or the quiet moments of Godspeed You Black Emperor! It’s subtle, gentle, drifting rock, seemingly as tightly constructed as a premeditated composition. This is especially true of the moments when the group collectively swirls into an ambient murmur, or when the darker grind of feedback or violin drones threaten to unsettle the mood, only for everything to re-coalesce into its former hazy subtlety. This fog hangs over everything on the album, and the hour of music here has a hallucinatory quality that’s affecting and emotional for exactly as long as it takes to play the CD. Afterwards, that mood dissipates almost immediately, a transient calm that’s easily disrupted once the music stops playing.

The collaboration between Japanese guitarist Uchihashi Kazuhisa and the transplanted American clarinetist Gene Coleman provides an entirely different perspective on improv, one that will be much more familiar to aficionados of the European plink-and-plonk approach. Kazuhisa, in the contexts I’ve heard him, is an incredibly diverse and versatile musician, tending towards psychedelic guitar fuzz and drones, but here he and Coleman seem united in a much minimalist (even pointillist) sound. They approach their duo as a blank space, filled with spiky intrusions of sound that make brief splashy pinpricks of color on the surface. Not that Storobo Imp is in the near-silent school of improv most notably practiced, of late, by another Japanese guitarist, Taku Sugimoto. That’s just not Kazuhisa’s style, and there are a lot of pinpricks here – individually, they remain small and indistinct in a vast white field, but taken together they create quite a lively mess of sounds. The album is book-ended by two longish tracks on which Kazuhisa plays guitar and electronics, and one of the album’s best stretches occurs on the first track, when he provides a shimmering high-pitched drone over which Coleman improvises some stuttery but quite melodic playing. On the five briefer tracks in the middle of the album, Kazuhisa plays the daxophone, an obscure instrument made from vibrating wooden strips, which sounds eerily like a human voice. On these tracks, the plaintive cries of the daxophone blend in better with Coleman’s jittery playing, but this actually works to the album’s disadvantage. Without the foil of Kazuhisa’s more stable droning electronics and crisp guitar tones, Coleman’s playing comes off as indulgent and wanky. And there’s not much to Kazuhisa’s playing here, either, beyond the novelty of its odd sound.

Finally, Molar’s Time and Motion Studies is yet another very different stance on improvisation. Molar is an electronic trio whose music is a thick, crisply digital take on improv, incorporating some guitar and keyboards as sound sources but relying on heavy live processing and manipulation. It’s another layer of improv that’s become prominent – even passé – since the widespread use of laptops has allowed musicians to incorporate techniques formerly associated with post-production directly into a live performance. What Molar comes up with on this album is rhythmic and propulsive, more closely linked to techno than to fellow electronic improvisers like Fennesz or the Mego laptop crew. It’s a pleasant and fairly relaxing of down-tempo electronics, easily transitioning between more experimental parts (the gorgeous layered drones on the appropriately named “Pulse”) and more beat-centered sections.

On the basis of these three albums, False Walls at the very least promises a somewhat different perspective in a world of increasingly tight specialization, with improv labels pigeonholing themselves into aesthetic corners and narrow definitions of improvisation. These albums may not provide anything truly stunning or original to chew on, but they are each a window onto a different way of improvising, a different outlook on spontaneity. That in itself is reason to give this label a closer look, and to hope for greater things in its future.

~ Ed Howard