«Happened by Accident» is the second solo album of French drummer Peter Orins, known from the French-Japanese quartet Kaze, the free-improv trio TOC and the trio his pianist brother, Stefan Orins. His debut solo album, «Empty Orchestras» (Helix, 2014) featured him experimenting with electronic transformation of the sounds of the drum set. On «Happened by Accident» Orins employs only the drum set, but again experimenting with assorted objects like bowls, wood and shells.
Orins asks us through the six-parts of the title piece to imagine anew the surprisingly quite fragile sounds of the drums, the richness of its timbres and the dynamic textures produced by his set. His improvisations attempts to stretch the ambiguity of these timbres and to investigate, the saturation of the acoustic sounds or the harmonics specific to each parts of the drum set. Orins is fascinated by the the so-called microscopic noises of the skins and the metallic parts and how these parts are rubbed, struck, pressurized or prepared, at very low power and at high volume. His improvisations are focused on chance events or unpredictable acoustic interactions that transcends the errors into provocative yet organic textures, often sounding as quiet, industrial drones from alien universes. Orins establishes on these pieces distinct senses of time, process and space. Better listen with headphones, or loud enough in order to grasp all details of these sonic inventions.
Orins tells that his new approach was influenced by experimental minimalist composers like Michael Pisaro, James Saunders or Anthony Pateras. All led him to offer his interpretation of American composer and music theorist James Tenney’s seminal «Having Never Written A Note For Percussion (for John Bergamo)» (from the «Postal Pieces», written in 1971). Tenney’s piece was originally written on the back of a postcard and included one simple note: play an extended roll on an undefined percussion instrument for an undefined period of time, from silence to a peak of quadruple fortissimo and back again. Orins channels the lessons from his improvised pieces into his tour-de-force interpretation of Tenney’s composition. Orins creates continuous, suggestive waves of highly resonating sounds that just get deeper, more powerful and more voluminous, but later softer, gentler and more sparse until you may experience being embraced, transformed and recalibrated by this meditative, vibrant drone.
Eyal Hareuveni
Peter Orins (dr, obj.)
