NO GENRE

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Earlier this month, Colin Stetson quietly released a collaborative album with Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustaffson.   Stones wasn’t just difficult and demanding; its bellicosity practically seethed in the atonal blats and stabbing squeaks that defined the album’s sound.  Though they shared their names on the record sleeve, this was primarily Gustaffson’s affair.  Free of the tonally angry free verse of Gustaffson, Stetson, alone, wired like a madman with microphones, sounds much more mannered.  The fluttery arpeggios of his best work only sound like a chaotic whirlwind of notes.  Even at his most turbulent, Stetson’s steady hand guides the composition through the storm of his own creation.  In advance of the forthcoming New History Warfare Vol 3: To See More Light, Stetson has released the howling “High Above the Gray Green Sea.”  Here, the rising tide of notes is stayed by the haunting bellow of a detached voice.  The yowl pushes the upper register of the mix, carving out a tremendous distance between the song’s two core elements, an subtle touch that allows Stetson to keep the fluttering notes under control.  And its exactly in these moments that Stetson’s work feels like a well-reasoned argument by an utter crank prophet.

Frying saxophone solos!  Synthesizers recreating lost sunny days!  Nihilistically lewd mixtapes inspiring dozens of new entries on Urban Dictionary!  Tricked-out dubstep for American mall rats!  The musical trends that defined much of 2011′s critically-lauded output were roundly ignored by my favorite records of the year.  The best albums of the year invented their own one-band microgenres.  EMA gave us California confessional poetry, while WU LYF reinvented protest punk for a generation without a cause.  Wolves in the Throne Room continued to hone their environmental black metal.  Das Racist refined their postmodern identity joke rap.  Peaking Lights invented Midwestern dub, and Matthew Herbert imagined such a thing as porcine house.  Colin Stetson’s Blood Meridian jazz was as refreshing as The Field’s glacial soul trance.  The Weeknd was a visionaire who fashioned a shockingly sleazy form of rohypnol R&B.  And then there was Björk doing her best Björk in years.  As always, the bands that conveniently forgot that a dominant aesthetic existed in both the mainstream and the underground produced the most rewarding albums.  Maybe this is more a reflection of personal taste, but 2011 seemed like a thrillingly strange year because it took me months to listen to anything that sat on top of the iTunes charts because I was so deeply enmeshed in an album of skronky avant-garde jazz.  As a relatively low-key year (compared to the beast that was 2010), 2011 favored a lot of these dark horses and long shots if you were willing to listen past the noise of the lomography revivalists and the bedroom mix-masters.

Photo Credit:  TheHutch

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Improbable as it seems, the last few years have seen a resurgence in non-jazz saxophones.  Once  They’ve been lifted out of jazz brunches and placed squarely into otherwise cool indie records (Before Today, Kaputt, Halcyon Days).  A nasty sax solo even finds its way on to Lady Gaga’s new album.  But while many haute-indie purveyors have found ways to reappropriate cheesy saxophones, Colin Stetson wields an ancient bass saxophone like a war horn.  By using a physiologically complex circular breathing method, Stetson is able to create a stunning flurry of notes that are as beautiful as they are cacophonous.  Stetson doesn’t have time for coy little games of winking irony; in his hands, the saxophone becomes something sincere and apocryphal and primitive and metaphysical.

The stunning New History Warfare Vol 2 showcased Stetson’s compositional talents, forging transcendent moments out of short bursts of hopelessly complex musical figures.  Now, a quick followup EP, Those Who Didn’t Run, builds the album’s achievement by significantly expanding Stetson’s compositions, pushing the two songs outward to over ten minutes a piece.  Titled after a cryptic line from apocalyptic ”A Dream of Water,” a piece narrated by Laurie Andereson, Those Who Didn’t Run feels like a natural extension of New History Warfare both in terms of aesthetic and ethos.

Musically, Those Who Didn’t Run is built of the same raw material: furiously arpeggiated figures, course ghost bellows, martially percussive clacks.  The key difference, however, is that both “Those Who Didn’t Run” and “The End of Your Suffering” are significant investments.  Stretching beyond their own horizons, the songs lock you in for the duration partly because it dares you to engage with such avant-baroque music.  Of the two, “Those Who Didn’t Run” is the more immediately rewarding; its fat, melodic figures are highlighted by the subtle use of counterpointing.  Like a pot of simmering rust, “Those Who Didn’t Run” boils and steams and vents, generating a tremendous amount of heat in the process.   But as challenging as “The End of Your Suffering” may seem initially, it rewards patience because the almost narrative-like arc of the conflict and resolution of the song’s primary themes is breathtaking.  To this end, there is again something vaguely apocalyptic about Those Who Didn’t Run.  When the titular lines pops up in “A Dream of Water,” Anderson seems to be referring to a group who stayed behind to face whatever hellish fate try to claim everyone else.  Like New History Warfare, this record sounds ghosted, paranoid of the universe’s cataclysmic potential.  But, as always with Stetson, just as piece seems on the verge of being overwhelmed, he finds a humane center amid the chaos, a figure, a line, a subtle tone shift that locates something distinctly tender and raw.

I vaguely recall an interview with Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch where he claimed, essentially, that he didn’t understand music that wasn’t sincere.  He was depressed (and maybe a little repulsed) by the blankly cynical irony that dominated much of the indie culture from the 90s.  This stuck with me because it seemed like a powerful repudiation of a kind of digestibly ironic art (bad=good) that gets too easily propagated.  The disingenuous inclusion of hairy sax solos in Before Today and Kaputt is frustrating because it’s all about ironic posturing.  It’s a ‘stache, a trucker hat, a sweating can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.  While I understand that Tim and Eric certainly have their place in the culture, I appreciate and admire sincere artistic expression more than I do clever re-appropriation.  Because Kaputt feels like an interesting intellectual exercise and Those Who Didn’t Run feels like a thrilling abstract reflection of something resembling the messiness of existence.

Rating: 8.5 / 10

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New History Warfare Vol 2 is a radical experiment in musical physics.  The record acts like a particle accelerator, smashing Coltrane and Reich and Glass together, scattering undiscovered elements of the universe into dizzying arcs and eddies.  In the hot ground zero in the aftermath of this collisions stands Colin Stetson, a man so beguilingly talented that fully half of the enjoyment offered by his newest record is just figuring how the fuck he made these sounds with just the air in his expansive lungs.  By distorting familiar free jazz idioms, shaping them into something resembling avant-garde noise, Stetson has created something wholly original.  For Stetson, the saxophone isn’t simply an instrument of expression; it’s a testing ground for progressively bold ideas about just what kind of ruckus can constitute the most beautiful music you’ve never heard.

Throughout New History Warfare, the sounds coming from Stetson seem utterly alien, almost inhuman in their thrilling strangeness.  And it only gets weirder when you consider the remarkable techniques used to create this whirlwind of carefully controlled chaos.  Each track is a solo performance (no overdubs, no loops) by Stetson on his ancient bass saxophone, a stunning piece of equipment that looks more like a novel steam punk invention than a conventional instrument.  To record these performances, Stetson tricked out his person with about two dozen microphones to capture his saxophone’s sounds from every possible angle.   The score of microphones also means that Stetson utilizes every possible sound in the mix.  Behind the dominant musical figure of a given track, there are subtler noises easing their way in and out of the mix: the bassy growls and the bronze wails, the screeching high notes mingling with softer tones wedging their way into the mix.  The variety of sounds he blows out of his saxophone is remarkable:  sometimes it’s warped sheet metal oxidizing in the sun, other times it’s frantic dance between lightning bugs on a time lapse video.  He even manages to add a percussive element with the gentle clack of the sax’s keys to keep time.  And to make this all the more radical, Stetson has perfected the circular breathing method, which basically just allows him to continue to play while he breathes comfortably with his nose.  The effect is immediately apparent:  these songs never rest for a moment, inexorably surging forward like a biblical flock of birds.  Like a flock of birds, Stetson’s notes shift and dive in unison with the slightest turn of the wing, the individual melding at the convergence of a million other individuals.

But Stetson’s achievement extends far beyond his idiosyncratic technique; he is not a blank virtuoso.  New History Warfare is a startling record because it contains multitudes, ranging from the infernal intensity of “The Stars in His Head” to the luminescent “Clothed in the Skin of the Dead.”  Stetson even enlists Laurie Anderson to read intriguing spoken word, most effectively on the haunting “A Dream of Water.”  The album is at once sad and apocalyptic and hopeful and ruined and beautiful.  There’s also something vaguely spiritual about the album, as if Stetson were channeling the chaos of the firmament through his lungs and out his saxophone’s enormous bell.  ”Home” is a swampy spiritual that throbs with gentle melancholy, and “Red Horse (Judges II)” is a fiery sermon preached by a deranged saxophone.  Thick with smoke and cries, the lowly grind of “Judges” could very well soundtrack a voodoo ceremony.  And “The Righteous Wrath of an Honorable Man” is simply transcendent, its whirling flurry of arpeggiated notes recalling the holiest moments of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.  Pinpointing the exact emotional tenor of the album is difficult, but it vacillates between the sacred and profane often enough the it seems as if Stetson has something enormous in mind.

Coming so late to an widely heralded record requires a fair amount of penitence.  If everyone is screaming about an album, the least you can do is give the damn thing a listen.  But if you don’t heed the initial advice of the masses, you have to proceed humbly, grateful that their words eventually slipped past your pride.  And when you declare your love for that album, you need to speak in tones as clear as mountain water.  Here I am, lifting my jug and pouring it out for you:  Colin Stetson’s incomparable New History Warfare Vol 2 is truly and genuinely and completely unlike anything I have ever heard before.  Stetson has created a rare record that decisively proves to every cynic and snob that there are still sounds unheard, breathtaking, strange, beautiful.

Rating: 9 / 10