Duncan Pinhas, Yérri-Gaspar Hummel, Voyage initiatique, France, Lab’ut, LABUT005 CD (2023)
As far as I can tell, “Voyage initiatique” is the first album guitarist Duncan Pinhas and saxophonist Yérri-Gaspar Hummel have released together. Some TSP readers will know (or be interested to discover) that Duncan Pinhas is the son of French electronic rock guitarist Richard Pinhas who began his music career with Schizo in 1972 and hit his stride with progressive / experimental electronic rockers Heldon, releasing seven albums in the space of two to three years from 1974 to 1978. Duncan fils has chosen to plough his own musical path in free jazz and similar or overlapping music genres. Fellow Frenchman Hummel, based in Strasbourg, runs his own studio and label Lab’ut and directs the annual EXHIBITRONIC Festival, focusing on sound, technology and the performing arts, in his home city.
On “Voyage initiatique” (“Initiatory voyage” – so this indeed is the duo’s collaborative debut), Pinhas and Hummel bounce from long droning pieces to free jazz and back again, starting with the fittingly titled opener “Aurora” where they wake up from a long slumber and stretch themselves on their instruments. They test out their instruments and their rapport on “Ascent” and several other tracks that follow immediately after, going down detours and paths that look inviting, and checking out the scenery there. Some pieces have a distinct ambience where the musicians appear to be a bit lost in a wide cavernous space but somehow the two find each other again in the nick of time and go off on a different journey. On these tracks (like “Wild” and “Shadows”), the guitar hardly sounds much like a guitar and more like a magic music platform that can mimic almost any stringed instrument on the planet.
The first indication that the duo are lifting their game from tentative and exploratory to something more feverish comes in “Haze” with its roaring, quivery guitar feedback drones and occasional saxophone squalling. Drone almost mutating into near-screeching noise turns “Degrees” into a stand-out piece for the album. The long screechy tones can be quite painful and Hummel’s excitable sax playing isn’t exactly what you’d call soothing. After a bit more scrabbling, the duo go into warm atmospheric mode in the sunny and radiant “Awakening”, which also features some severe growling noise guitar drones. “Schwarzwald”, coming very late in the album, is the first and only track to feature actual guitar riffing. At last, the closing track “Lava”, clocking in at nearly eleven minutes, arrives with a range of music from dark, almost Gothic moodiness to insane high-pitched tittering toy music-box noise to background noise drone storm. Sax floats overhead with melancholy improvisation. This last piece is by far the most interesting and varied of all 14 tracks.
Most of the best work on “Voyage …” comes in the album’s second half and the whole work is very lengthy, clocking over an hour’s worth of music, so it is worth getting through the first half if you can or pick out the tracks most interesting to you. Parts of the album are quite slow getting the whole soundscape into action, though I suppose there’s a case to be said for the album progressing as slowly as it does. Some of the best pieces on “Voyage …” are those with a definite atmosphere and emotional background for the guitar and sax to work off their energy. While this debut might not exactly set your house or apartment on fire, Pinhas and Hummel do work well together, listening to one another’s playing and shaping his response accordingly. These guys may well have several albums’ worth of material in them that’s waiting for the duo to return to the studio to unleash digitally or in physical form, and at least one if not more will be a major masterpiece work.