Fear of the Unknown
I wanted to make something that was specific to the medium of recording. I want to make albums that are like a Murakami novel or a Terrence Malick film– something that explicitly states its own world.
Colin Stetson, Pitchfork Interview, 03/02/11
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When is the last time you listened to something truly new, something that bears no resemblance to anything you’ve heard before, something that invites, requires a vocabulary you never used for music? An experience like this is a rare and precious thing. It is also a frightening one, when you are faced with an object that both fascinates and eludes you, like the dream you keep trying to remember.
I often dream in music. In my dreams, the songs always develop into strange themes, held together by this gossamer logic of things oneiric. They make sense as they are, sound like nothing I have ever recorded before, and yet they sound so familiar. They sound as though they had always been there, as though they had always belonged to my subconscious. Or everybody’s, maybe.
These dream pieces don’t really exist within a specific time-frame, devoid of clear spatial references, and yet they are fully formed and self-contained. They get to the essence of music without the cumbersome baggage of conscious thought and excessive rationalisation.
But then I wake up, and they are gone forever.
Listening to Colin Stetson’s new album, New History Warfare Vol.II: Judges, reminds me of this dream state I often find myself in, and it is an encounter hard to describe if you haven’t already felt it for yourself. I’m consciously using the verb feel rather than hear or listen, because the record works on more sensory levels.
As an artistic statement, few albums have matched its cogency and sense of purpose in recent memory, and as a musical journey it brings you as close to this unattainable source of pure music as possible without ever losing its immediacy and accessibility. As uncompromising as Stetson’s aesthetic principles may seem, they are made of the simplest, most elemental components of music in its essence: sound, pulse, vibration, tension, release.
Judges
Stetson describes the process involved in the recording of the album in his Pitchfork interview, and the review does an admirable job describing to what extent the resulting sound deeply affects the listener. This atavistic return to an organic form feels even more miraculous as it takes place in a period over-reliant on electronics, which has made looping and overdubbing almost too easy to use, and abuse. How well do you know yourself, your instrument, if you don’t push it to its (un)natural limits?
The Silent Ballet, usually shy about undeserved superlatives, makes a case for the record’s importance in its groundbreaking approach and dedication to a single instrument, and watching Stetson play Judges makes it abundantly clear. This goes beyond mere performance: there is a visceral response to what he does that transcends styles, genres and musical boundaries. Is this jazz, contemporary, avant-garde? Does it even matter?
red horse (Judges II)
Of course, Stetson did not make Judges in a complete vacuum, and the roster of collaborators speaks volumes about the place this particular record should keep in your personal pantheon if you have been following the Montreal instrumental scene. Or Ben Frost.
As the man in charge of mixing 24 different tracks of the same take, I can only imagine the insanity of the task. Then again, it’s Ben Frost we’re talking about. There is not a sound or vibration wasted: clicks and pads become percussive patterns, breathing pauses take a life of their own, and the entire range of the bass saxophone overtones is emphasized in the same nocturnal way wolves and otherworldly textures were used to fill the space between fear and familiarity in By The Throat.
Listen to Red Horse for example. This is the music you’ve always had in the back of your head: deceptively simple, organic and visceral. It could have been conjured up centuries ago, and our descendants will feel it with the same primal intensity. It comes without artifice, without pretense. It just is what it is, pure music, not unlike ancient chants, or Bach’s Goldberg Aria.
Colin Stetson – Fear of the unknown and The Blazing Sun by Inc4estimation
In the end, and most importantly, this is what makes the strength of New History Warfare, Volume II. It can be as experimental and leftfield as you want it to be, but there is no denying its immediacy. The experience is so engrossing that I surprised myself craving for it once
fear of the unknown and the blazing sun gave way to in love and justice and its ominously enigmatic ending. And at the same time, I was relieved that music of this caliber would, and should, retain a spirit of genuine humility.
I was showing those videos to the kids this morning, and watching them intently studying the monstrous size of the instrument, instinctively keeping the natural beat of the songs, unable to avert their curious gaze, I knew Stetson had reached what few have: a sense of wonder.
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Colin Stetson is playing at the Drake on Friday, 26th of August. Tickets are sold at the usual outlets. I really can’t wait.
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