“Improvisation. I don’t buy it.” Morton Feldman’s dickish statement keeps coming back to haunt me, even though I fundamentally disagree with it in principle. When I listen to it, I keep wondering Am I really enjoying this or is it some kind of trick? Basically, is the audience sharing a musical experience or just basking in the reflected glory of some goof(s) having fun making noise?
There was no audience at the recording “at LAS club” for The Last Minute Or Later, a set of duets by Kevin Drumm and Adam Golebiewski. Golebiewski is the percussionist, with assorted objects and instruments. Drumm is credited only with electronics. It was all recorded on one day back in 2016 but just got released last year by some new Polish label called UZNAM. Four tracks, and I don’t know how much, if any, editing went into constructing each piece: each track works as a coherent, developed composition in the best way you hope that improvisations will go. Lightening Up matches drums to Drumm’s hollow electronic tones before building up to the more pleasuirng sort of musical anarchy and white noise percussion. I Can’t Not Lie gets messier in a more free improv way, scraped objects squealing while surrounded by angry twitterings and a guttural screech. The longest track, Fenced Off From Larger Worries, stays in the higher registers throughout. It floats, but aggressively, relying less on the single-mindedness of its approach to sustain its length and more on the ringing tones produced by both musicians. Furnace returns to a barrage of metal and grumbling, juddering drones, both percussion and electronics behaving in a spontaneous way, darting from one idea to the other without losing momentum. Drumm and Golebiewski work well together, each simultaneously complementing and provoking the other.
The electronics are unspecified but sound like feedback oscillation plays are large part – as may be expected from Drumm’s guitar background. That sound is also present in Intraspect, a half-hour recording of a live gig in Guildford by Phil Durrant and Bill Thompson. Amplified objects also appear here but in a more heavily electronic setting, including “modular synthesis” and “Moog guitar”. Intraspect glides seamlessly throughout its duration without ever getting too simple or droney. Working live in this way, it’s easy to maintain a musical focus by staying in one place, but Durrant and Thompson are confident enough to let inherent instability in their electronics lead them constantly into new terrain without ever losing their bearings. Neither of these releases are a revolution in improvisation; they both just bloody good at what they set out to do.
