Sten Sandell - Solid Musik (nuscope)

Pianist Sandell is known, if known at all, to a great number of listeners primarily as a sometime associate of Mats Gustafsson, and, by extension, Ken Vandermark: another proficient yet sly improviser, another musician happily occupied with both fastidious investigation and sheer play. By virtue of his association with two of the most cited names in contemporary transatlantic "free jazz", Sandell is also something of pre-approved taste, a musician -- slightly rumpled, avuncularly middle-aged, largely unheralded -- whose work is much esteemed among fellow musicians but whose work is also deemed to be a bit too subtle for those of us on the outside. Which is all very strange, because not only is Sandell a charter member of the Gush ensemble, he is also the mastermind behind two substantial releases on the (lowercase before lowercase was cool) nuscope label, an enterprise that has made a specialty of documenting pianists (Fred Van Hove, Georg Graewe).

Solid Musik, Sandell's second nuscope effort, is highly individual solo piano recital made up of rather diverse exercises in instrumental preparation. Sandell avoids obvious modifications to his "Baldwin SD-10" and instead concentrates on exceedingly subtle refinements of the manner in which strings are muted and otherwise made to resonate differently; in his deployment of uncommon yet abundant acoustical resources, e.g., the wood of the piano's frame; and in his own keyboard "touch". This is not to say that Sandell is a technician who has little to no use for thematic material. He has a fine, prickly sense of melody. His rhythms often allude to ragtime and boogie-woogie... as re-imagined by Conlon Nancarrow. Sandell introduces space -- rests -- into his extemporizations (most notably, "not gas") the way a photographer negotiates with light, through an aperture. Dilating, dwindling. Suffused, penumbral. Quite partial to contrasts, particularly of pitches and tempi, Sandell nonetheless loves unifying these contrasts within carefully rendered dynamic ranges. The pianist also makes his own overtures to the kind of processes favored by minimal composers -- addition in small, nimbly manipulated increments; transpositions that "chase", and sometimes "catch", one another -- but, because these flourishes are just several strategies among many in the development of a rather capacious design, they emerge, if not randomly, then at least considerably transformed by an exponential unpredictability: their own raised by their own circumstances'. Sandell's is a surreptitious, ever-branching rigidity, presuming the term is not lost completely in this adjectival thicket. So that listening to Solid Musik is a little like learning about the curvature and consistency and texture and thickness of the invisible walls of an enclosure by observing the behavior of tiny particles as they deflect and are deflected about, then scintillate in destruction.

Any resemblance to popular accounts of matters quantum mechanical is purely coincidental.