Looper/John Tilbury - Mass

Esquilo
ESO10/ESDVD001

“Mass” is a DVD containing two performances from a collaboration between Looper (Nikos Veliotis, cello; Martin Küchen, saxophone; Ingar Zach, percussion) and John Tilbury (piano). Each performance took place in front of a video by Veliotis, the same 55-minute film accompanying both.

Before experiencing the project, I automatically took the word “mass” to refer to the physical quality, not the religious service. I was at least partially wrong. The imagery in Veliotis’ video was largely derived from sacred iconography of the kitschier sort, religious (Catholic and Greek Orthodox, predominantly, as near as I can tell) representations of sorrowful Christ’s, Byzantine Mary’s, etc. The methodology employed is painfully simple, however and, after possibly a few initial seconds of bafflement, utterly without mystery or depth. Those first moments are in fact intriguing, presenting an image that gives a brief impression of abstraction, tinted in the predominant colors that we’ll see throughout, a kind of sea green and a light, rusted orange. Quickly, though, you make out representational images: a small face or two, an upside down Christ head, others that don’t quite resolve but, you feel, will eventually. Another second or two and you realize the means utilized: Veliotis has taken transparencies of the images and overlaid them, often aligning quasi-similar shapes atop each other. He then moves the individual sheets slightly, sometimes tilting them back and forth, other times rotating them several degrees to one side then another. Once deciphered—and, as I said, this takes all of several seconds—interest evaporates. Some of the transitions are notably clumsy (a head of a Greek Orthodox priest morphing into a bespectacled man, for example). I allowed for the possibility that the clumsiness (including the silhouette of fingers at one point) was intentional, perhaps to be read as a commentary on the overt silliness of the “stuff” of the religions represented. Even so, and I’ve no real reason to think it’s the case, any such point could have been made in a tiny fraction of the time this video consumes. A blurb for the release talks about an attempt, by rocking the images, to detach them from clinging to any notion of absolute truth. Again, if so, awkwardly done and a point easily made in a short amount of time. There are some individual moments where, purely visually, things come somewhat alive. I’m thinking particularly of a sequence with a coruscating yellow and black “frame” surrounding a Raphael Madonna head or two that reminds me of some of Gustave Moreau’s more crepuscular watercolors. But for each such instance, there’s far more tedium. The video is repeated on each track, which run 55 minutes apiece.

That’s the bad news. The good news is the music—very, very good news. The first performance is from Oslo, in October 2005. In many respects, it’s much like what one would expect going into such a collaboration: muted, fairly steady-state, with the members of Looper providing a soft, complex hum and Tilbury spending a great deal of time away from the keyboard, rubbing or otherwise exciting his instrument on box and strings. There’s a lovely spray of scattered sounds as well, Zach (I imagine) nonchalantly dropping ping pong balls or their equivalent on the stage while Tilbury gently hammers a couple of mid-range cords. Zach scampers around quite a bit on this piece, actually, but always with extreme light-footedness, like a squirrel lost among the instrumental paraphernalia while Küchen and Veliotis tend to provide washes and rough-edged burrs to help cohere the work. When Tilbury first touches the keys, it’s with a variation on his by now standard rising arpeggio but that is only allowed a brief glimmer before he returns to the body of the piano. When he comes back to the ivory, it’s with a far darker hue, a brief squall erupting before the quartet returns to quiet, but with a more disturbed, troubled tone where Tilbury’s angelic figures attain a different aspect by virtue of the new environment. There’s a fine section of heavy cello dronage before things finally subside. It’s a lovely performance. If there’s something about it that, ultimately, I find a bit “expected” that’s a small quibble; I expect fine things from these folk.

Still, I was happy to find that the second piece, recorded in Stavanger in 2006, explores a very different topography, one with a range of hills, crisscrossed by torrents and ravines. It’s immediately dark and roiling, the cello throbbing, Tilbury worrying the nether reaches of the keys. The pace remains slow but the music is more fragmented, arriving in mottled slabs, one peeling off of the next. Zach and Küchen engage in heavy, almost oppressive rhythmic wheezing, contributing to the mysterious aura, a rhythm Zach extends on muffled percussion a bit later, first behind a beautiful, pensive mini-melody from Tilbury, then casting out on its own across a forbidding field. The piece billows and broods from here on in, filling the valleys like a heavy fog. The closing drone sequence is deeply moving, almost mournful. Looper and Tilbury touch profundity here, likely the most stirring work of new music I’ve heard this year.

Wonderful music; you’re own your own with the video. Highly recommended.

esquilo