The Sealed Knot - Surface/Plane

Meniscus (MNSCS 012)

In recent years, Western Europe has seen a great deal of development in terms of standards in chamber settings. Improvisers embrace the chamber configuration/approach as an environment where dynamics may take a life of their own, be it energetic quests for collective compromise or extensive stretches of silence. Anything goes. Taking sparing cues from Webern and Cage, The Sealed Knot (Burkhard Beins- percussion, Rhodri Davies- harp, and Mark Wastell- cello) creates a stage for shared improvisation with inventive treatments and preparations for their acoustic instruments.

“Surface,” was recorded in London’s acoustically-charming All Angels Church, a venue of preference for many European improvisers for its ability to seemingly suspend sound. The music is unlike the members’ various side projects (IST, Chris Burn Ensemble), though equally compelling, and the trio makes immediately clear that they are not approaching music as performance artists, but rather as structuralists. The sounds evoke a simmering landscape with mineral-rich soil but facing a looming, threatening season ahead. It is dark music, with hopefulness replace by urgency, and the percussive tactics with which each instrument is employed a cloudy reminder that today’s chamber music is not what yesterday may have forecast. At intermittent points, auxiliary plucks of cello strings emerge from the bristly undercurrent created from Beins’ skins and the prepared harp. Resonant tones hover and fade, akin to the uneven trebly moans pulled from a wine glass and a moist fingertip. “Plane” was recorded the day before at St. Paul’s Hall in Huddersfeld, and while the music is blessed with the same acoustic quality found in All Angels, the sounds are quite different. The second piece begins with more abrasive textures, with Davies’ prepared harp at the fore. It is unclear exactly what devices he used these evenings to alter the harp, but there are faint hints of paper and metallic objects at work. Beins’ work here is far removed from other outings, the ethereal Lidingo with Andrea Neumann in particular. While his playing is sporadic in the first half of the disc, he is all over the second, his drums at times leading the music, most notably during a segment where muffled bass thuds bend cadences to points of chaos. Still, there is an essence of restraint that should not go unmentioned.

There is an unaffected beauty to the blooms of these two extended pieces. Impulses seem crucial to the trio’s ideas in their limited environment, and their music materializes so freely. The air is filled with deceptively organized patterns and it becomes a nagging wonder that these performances weren’t preconceived at all. It is a brilliant work that exemplifies what we have come to know as contemporary minimalism.

~Alan Jones