Negligiblism brings together an experimental, unconventional quartet of the American Bay Area free-improv scene featuring English horn and electronics player Kyle Brukmann, bass drum player and drummer Jacob Felix Heule, koto player Kanoko Nishi-Smith (who recorded before with Brukmann and Heule, on the last two pieces), and vocal artist and electronics player Danishta Rivero (who has played with Heule as the Voicehandler duo). The four musicians have collaborated in various configurations since 2007, but this is their first album as a quartet.
The four pieces sketch raw, noisy, intense, and brutal but highly nuanced textures that trample genre boundaries, but are obsessed with expanding the sonic palette of this unconventional electroacoustic quartet into uncharted territories, often with different, more challenging aspects of the four musicians’ palettes. Obviously, Bruckmann and Rivero employ extended breathing techniques when they are not busy with electronics and synth drones; Heule alternates between the bass drum and the full drum kit; and Nishi-Smith deconstructs the koto. Remarkably, the four pieces suggest a strong, collective sonic identity of this quartet and accumulate into a volatile, thought-provoking sound-oriented suite, reaching its dramatic, chaotic, and otherworldly climax in the last, 19-minute «dredgery».
The aptly titled An Inscrutable Bodily Discomforting Thing documents another free improvised meeting of two duos – Heule and Rivero (formerly known as the Voicehandler duo) and long-time collaborators – Peruvian bassist Teté Leguía (who also painted the cover) and sax player Martín Escalante. It is a mysterious forty-minute piece that surprises with its introspective and seductive veins, before all drown into noisy, toxic lava. Still, it is rarely discomforting as can be expected from such hellraisers as Leguía and Escalante, and eventually balancing their brutal attacks with the psychedelic, somatic, deconstructed song forms of Rivero and Heule.
Eyal Hareuveni
Danishta Rivero (voice, electronics), Kanoko Nishi-Smith (koto), Jacob Felix Heule (bass drum, drum set), Kyle Bruckmann (English horn, electronics), Teté Leguía (bass), Martín Escalante (saxophone)
https://fullspectrumrecords.bandcamp.com/album/negligiblism
https://kettlehole.bandcamp.com/album/an-inscrutable-bodily-discomforting-thing
