On Wasp Honey (DISCUS MUSIC DISCUS 138CD), Martin Archer and friends present an array of different approaches – playing compositions, a graphic score, and free improvisations. Archer plays saxophones (and flute, and bass harmonica), with John Jasnoch on bass guitar, Sarah Farmer on violin and electronics, and Lee Boyd Allatson on drums.
Farmer and Allatson are part of the Birmingham Improvisation Orchestra, so in one sense this is an ad-hoc on-the-hoof group assembly, but impressively they managed to record this entire album in a single day. Three pieces are compositions by Archer, including the splendidly pessimistic ‘Microagressor’ which may refer to anything from triggers in the workplace to a virus attacking your PC, although you may prefer the longer ‘Two Way Traffic’, which on the surface may seem more accessible, but there’s a lot of ingenuity in the way it manages the different solo lines from sax or violin. Then there’s ‘WSMay10’, a graphic score created by Walt Shaw, the drummer who we last heard on See You Soon Or See You Sometime from this label; on today’s record we hear the same information interpreted by all four players in turn, each taking their stab at relaying it for their respective instrument; my personal fave of the four is Sarah Farmer’s, two minutes of skeletal spider-web tracery from her violin (complete with vocal interjections as she apparently talks herself through the score). Although her piece appears quite late in the programme, I would still say it sets the tone for the remainder of the set, which is rather downbeat in places, if not outright bleak; both ‘Swoon’ and ‘Flood’, two of the longer free improvisations here, indicate the default temperament of this foursome is not of a happy disposition, as they muse on current affairs and the uncertain state of the world.
Anthony Donovan’s monochrome photo-images, possibly treated and collaged in Photoshop, propose a grim industrial future with implied menace lurking just out of eyeshot, not unlike a Pere Ubu record cover from 1979. (12/09/2022)