Phillip Golub is an American, Brooklyn-based young pianist, improviser, and composer, who describes himself as «grounded in but not constrained by his engaged practice in jazz, creative music, and new music. Technically audacious, Golub sublates distant sound worlds, negating conventions, yet building on traditions». Golub’s debut album, Axioms // 75ab, with the Troops quintet (Biophilia, 2020) marked Antony Braxton’s 75th birthday with interpretations of his compositions. He also worked as a musical dramaturg for Wayne Shorter’s jazz opera, Iphigenia, with a libretto by Esperanza Spalding.
Golub’s third album as a bandleader, Partisan Ship, is a suite of «utopian micronational anthems for the internet age», all of which use pitches outside the twelve-tone system commonly employed in jazz and classical music. It was inspired by a semi-absurdist narrative that Golub dreamed up about a group of «partisans» and their journey to a utopian micronation, and turned out to be an Oulipo-esque exercise, which culminates in a secret URL where one may or may not find Tik Tok (or Instagram) videos of Golub dancing to his own music.
Each of the ten pieces was written in its own tuning system, and the album’s score spans 157 pages. Golub enlisted for this project some of the most innovative improvisers in the New York scene – trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, tenor sax player and flutist Anna Webber, alto sax player David Leon, reed player Yuma Uesaka, violinist Layale Chaker, synth player Elias Stemeseder, and drummer Jon Starks, and recorded their individual parts. Then he spent many hours editing, mixing, and producing the album. Golub plays on Flexichord – a microtonal MIDI keyboard of Golub’s own design using Pianoteq software, which dictated the tuning changes for every piece, and analogue Behringer Neutron and Arturia Digital Synths.
Golub employs microtonality to discover and articulate new harmonies and chord structures. The Partisan Ship suite sounds like nothing you have ever listened to. Certainly eccentric, clearly demanding, most likely enhanced by the microtonal steroids. It is complex, dense, multilayered, obsessive, elusive, and not very comprehensible, but surprisingly accessible and full of brilliant ideas. After a few repeated listenings, this futurist music even makes sense. In its own special way, it faithfully captures the current zeitgeist, complex, fast, but with a very short attention span, and addiction to microdosing.
The listening experience to Partisan Ship is like taking a wild ride on a colorful, psychedelic rollercoaster. It flows organically despite its fractured pulses. Fellow pianist and composer Cory Smythe, who contributed liner notes, imagines Partisan Ship to «many flavors of technicolor consonance, puzzlingly ecstatic grooves». It brings to mind elements of bebop, big bands, neo-classicism, prog-rock, electronics, noise music, exotic world music, and avant-garde playing techniques, all thrown into a mad scientist’s stew, and spiced by some arresting solos. It never subscribes to any genre or style, but to its own elusive microtonal logic.
Eyal Hareuveni
Phillip Golub (Flexichord, Behringer Neutron, Arturia Digital synthsizers), Yuma Uesaka (clarinet, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, tenor saxophone, bass clariflute), Amir ElSaffar (trumpet), Anna Webber (flute, tenor saxophone), David Leon (alto saxophone), Layale Chake (5-string violin), Elias Stemeseder (Prophet VI, Moog Minitaur, Modular synthesizers). Sam Minaie (bass). Jon Starks (drums, sensory percussion, snaps, drum Machine)
https://phillipgolub.bandcamp.com/album/partisan-ship-2
