DDK Trio comprises three European improvisers whose work we have heard over the years, and in some cases grown to love or at least respect it – Jacques Demierre the pianist, trumpeter Axel Dörner, and accordion player Jonas Kocher. Demierre is the Swiss player who did some impressive things with his spinet on Christian Kobi’s record (Hidden Place of Return) and his solo LP The Hills Shout, an enigmatic item which we enjoyed. Kocher (also Swiss) we like for his determined efforts to remake the accordion, and its sound, on his own very specific terms. German puffer Dörner has rarely provided us with much actual listening pleasure, but he’s another extended-technique genius associated with long tones, increased minimalism, and playing very few notes; again he’s one we admire for his persistence, diligently working away in what may appear to be a very narrow field.
Today’s item A Right To Silence (MEENNA meenna-952) is unusual – three CDs in the box, and each one represents an individual member of the trio making a “choice” of the same source material, that is a corpus of music recorded live during a 2021 residency in France. Starting with the exact same “raw recordings”, as described here, the end result is three different albums. I’m quite prepared to believe all that, although I haven’t yet had the time to make detailed comparisons between them; and if one would like to know a little bit more about what the “choice” actually entailed, then I direct you to the intensive and detailed booklet, compiled by Thibault Walter, which conveys the process quite vividly, starting out with the proposal that these “three CDs act as an aural diffraction plate” – about as disarming a conversation-starter as you could desire.
There’s nothing bad about any of the music in this box, but the surprising dimension to me is that DDK apparently live by a strict rule, that of “non-influence-in-each-other’s-choice”, and they’ve been adhering to it quite carefully for several years. Non-influence? This is quite a radical take on free improvisation, which for years has been open to the possibility of other musicians influencing each other, either through performing together on the same stage, or sharing recordings, or otherwise collaborating and interacting as humans, but perhaps I’m being very naive and old-fashioned, and my long-held assumptions are now called into question. The austere DDK rules are, I think, further manifested in certain track titles here: ‘One is a Different Person’, ‘Precious Inattention’, ‘Sometimes Audible and Sometimes Inaudible’, and of course ‘A Right to Silence’. Some of these sentences carry the tone of an ideology, a belief system where political correctness and tact and purity of thought are privileged over such quaint notions as spontaneity, craft, or love of music. It’s possible I’m seeing a regime of severity and prescriptive practice, where in fact DDK simply regard their method as a productive discipline. But some of this ideology, along with its stiffness, shows up in the music here. Cold, sterile, lifeless; it’s as though the musicians are tip-toeing through a roomful of porcelain, afraid to make a move for fear of upsetting the others, failing to respect the “right to silence”, or otherwise breaking the rules.
If this musical stalemate is one possible endgame to years of reduced playing, minimalism, and extended technique, I can’t say I like it much; and the prospects for the continued life of improvised music (already a very marginalised art form) are in danger of being curtailed by such inflexibility. Even so, some interesting new sounds may emerge from this box set over time, and it might be that my concerns are entirely misplaced. From 15th September 2023.