Belgian guitarist Ruben Machtelinckx composed delicate and dreamy, open-ended compositions that played with silence for an acoustic quartet of him and fellow Belgian guitarist Bert Cools, both were playing steel-string acoustic guitars, reeds player Joachim Badenhorst and French percussionist Toma Gouband for the album porous structures (Aspen Edities, 2019). That album won the award for Best Belgian Jazz Album for that year.
The follow-up album, porous structures II, features a slightly different acoustic quartet. Belgian guitarist Frederik Leroux (Machtelinckx’s partner in the Poor Isa duo) and Norwegian, Berlin-based guitarist Fredrik Rasten join Machtelinckx, and all play steel-string acoustic guitars, with Gouband. The atmosphere is still refined and fragile but the focus shifts to textures and diffuse harmonies, with an undercurrent of tension and microtonal complexity, and a stubborn and endless game of organic variations. The quartet sound makes it impossible to distinguish which of the individual guitarists is doing what. Gouband was allowed to move freely, and he was recorded in a separate room from the guitarists. The musicians had a few conversations about the different directions the music could go but nothing more, as Machtelinckx wanted to capture the «conscious doubt» and the «extreme focus and awareness of time» of the first-ever performance of the quartet.
The album quotes a famous saying by the Argentine poet Antonio Porchia, «(Set out from any point). They are all alike. They all lead to a point of departure». And, indeed, Machtelinckx sets gorgeously colored sonic ecosystems that at first, especially in the first, 18-minute piece «in my earliest memory i see trees», sound like the music has no boundaries and acts as if it is in a state of statis and does not go anywhere, as Peter Margasak observed in his insightful liner notes. But the music does move and expands the poetic, hypnotic palette of the quartet in the following «falling forward becomes a walk», pushing gently against edges, and with the bowed guitars on the third and last piece «void of narration».
Eyal Hareuveni
Ruben Machtelinckx (steel-string acoustic guitar), Toma Gouband (percussion), Frederik Leroux (steel-string acoustic guitar), Fredrik Rasten (steel-string acoustic guitar)
