John Clair / Andrew Sosis - Filigree, John Clair - Early August

John Clair/Andrew Sosis
Filigree
Arrival
9

John Clair
Early August
Arrival
10

Two releases from John Clair, who occasionally posts here at Bags under the nom saltwatersnow, one in duo with Andrew Sosis, one solo, offer two rather different approaches. “Filigree” is a good, strong outing, largely focused on calm but intense concerns. Clair (tenor saxophone, portable feedback guitar, cymbal, piano and harmonica) and Sosis (electronics, psaltery) tend toward restraint but tinged with angst and agitation. Clair does a nice job of decontextualizing his saxophone on the opening track, “Scarlet Embers”, squeezing out sputters and purrs over subdued, fluttery pulses from Sosis, sustaining a thoughtful mood throughout. On “Teardrop Shaker”, it sounds like Clair is wielding that feedback guitar, occasionally to piercing effect, and matters wander a bit loosely for my taste, including an extended bowed cymbal interlude closing out the piece that never quite gains its footing. The last cut is the most successful with (I believe) the psaltery up front, strummed and plucked in semi-recognizable fashion over electronic scrabblings and hums. Beginning sedately, it gradually bubbles into a small welter of intersecting tones and “noise”, finally punctuated by several sharp notes from the piano; a very fully realized piece.

“Early August” is a whole ‘nuther bowl of tapioca. One track, about 45 minutes long, consisting of Clair manipulating exposed wires. That’s it and, moreover, that’s pretty much what it sounds like, at least on first blush. Even in the further reaches of sonic abstraction, there’s a tendency on the part of the listener, I think, to hear a given sound as transcending its source, as being a note instead of the sound of friction between a bow and a string, a tone instead of an amplifier hum, etc. We tend to isolate what we hear into a realm aesthetically apart, often, from its sources. Sometimes, it’s very difficult to do this and the question arises as to whether it’s always necessary. (I recall hearing a Keith Rowe performance during which he used an electronic kitchen implement, a beater of some sort. I mentioned to him afterwards that it, apart from many other of the everyday utensils he deployed, sounded very much like “what it was” when turned on, a rather jarring effect. “I know”, he said.) My first time through “Early August”, part of me had a similar “Is that all there is?” reaction. It seemed that, given the extremely restricted palette in use, the relative lack of variation in dynamics, timbre, etc. that any “success” would derive from the placement of sound, of a poetic situating of the crackles and hums and of the tension achieved thereby. It’s what I love, for instance, about several of Sachiko M’s recent works, that sense of rightness that manifests when simple sounds appear (or when they don’t). Here, my initial impression was one of fairly monochromatic sameness, an impenetrability that didn’t seem to mask any deeper reason for being. But then, one of the nice things when confronted with something like this is that it causes one to re-approach with differently attuned ears and, sure enough, when I did so I found a more variegated attack with at least a half-dozen distinguishable sound-areas. You can hear Clair working in a given field, then another, coaxing out hums of different volumes and textures, interlacing them with a limited range of pops and fizzles. While I’m pleased that repeated listenings allowed me to hear the piece more fully and to appreciate it far more than I did at first, I still find it lacking the exquisiteness of something like Sachiko’s work—not to compare the two in any way other than with regard a certain aspect of their extremeness. I certainly leave open the possibility that I’ll return to this one day a few years hence and be astonished by what I’d missed. As of today, though, I find it a challenging venture and worth hearing and thinking about but only a partially successful one.

I’ll be curious to see what happens with Mr. Clair and associates from here on in.

More information available from arrivalrecords@canada.com

(I also wanted to mention the lovely packaging, each disc enclosed in a thin, folded, intriguingly illustrated brown paper bag)

~ Brian Olewnick