Unusual double-CD set of modern music from the Novembre quartet. On the first disc of Encore (UMLAUT RECORDS UMFR-CD42), the compositions of Romain Clerc-Renaud (piano) and Antonin Tri Hoang (woodwinds) are played by the quartet, adding Thibault Cellier (bass) and Sylvain Darrifourca (drums), and they turn in eight memorably odd and quirky pieces. Although there are some post Bop jazz-ish moves on offer, it’s just as much in debt to the sort of experimental art music we used to hear on Chris Cutler’s ReR label in the 1980s and 1990s. The compositions are deliberately made to be rather complex, and possibly quite challenging to play, entailing a lot of stop-start movements, repetitions and variations of short themes, strong contrasts in timbre, and such like. This approach works best on the 12-minute ‘Miniatures’, which contains enough ideas for three albums in one track; that’s the most radical experiment here, while tunes like ‘Continuum’ are probably more accessible to conventional jazz listeners, and ‘Petit Matelot’ will please those who like maudlin sentiment worn on the collar button.
On the second disc, Marc Baron takes his recordings of the Novembre band and remakes them into an electro-acoustic suite of completely new music. He seems to have done this in 2017 or 2018, although the actual Encore record was made in 2021 (the notes are a little confusing). Baron, whose work we know from releases on Potlach and More Mars, adopts a very subtle and low-key approach to his cut-ups, mixage, and layering, and produces many intriguing audio puzzles of atmospheric cloudery, rough textures, and radical re-ordering of the original compositions. Only occasionally does the real-life sound of Novembre emerge from this photo-album of hazy, washed-out snapshots, and when they do it’s like having a beautiful dream interrupted in mid-flow. (22/02/2023)