Hawking Extended (ZAREK 23) abounds with unusual sounds, treatments, and textures, and makes a brave stab at pushing free improvisation a square or two further than was last managed in the times when EAI (electro-acoustic improvisation) was flourishing. But it’s being achieved at the expense of musical cohesion; in the general push towards saying more things in a smaller space, the discourse is reduced to formless babbling. Gunnar Geisse has his laptop guitar, Ignaz Schick is blowing his heart out through the alto sax while also adding to the overall chatter with his samplers and turntables. It’s left to drummer Ernst Bier to pick up the pieces, but he’s unable to round up this micro-herd of wild bison dancing around in circles, and his fences are trampled into the dust as soon as he’s got his next fencepost into the ground. Bier and Schick (both based in Berlin) first formed Hawking as a duo in 2013 and then invited the Hamburg player Geisse to join them for these sessions – recorded some years ago in 2018. I’m all in favour of “played in real time with no overdubs”, but for most of the time it’s hard to believe the musicians were even in the same room together. The players sound unengaged with the work, barely managing to acknowledge each other’s contributions. (OCT 2023)
Finding more expressive playing on Now Is Forever (ZAREK 21/22), a sprawling two-disc set which Ignaz Schick made with Douglas R. Ewart, a distinguished American player who joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) when he moved to the US from Kingston Jamaica in 1963. Thereafter he appeared on record with a number of luminaries of free jazz in the 1970s and beyond – including Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, George Lewis, and Leo Smith. The European Schick regards his personal purchase of the 1979 album Jila-Save! Mon.-The Imaginary Suite as one of many epiphanies, and following an online correspondence the duo managed to work together and record these sessions in Minneapolis in 2017.
The German player doesn’t disguise his child-like enthusiasm at working with one of his heroes, but also proposes that we perceive the results as a blend of European EAI free-improv with the earlier Afro-American traditions of free jazz. Schick stays pretty much on the electronic side of the stage with his turntables, sampler, looper/pitch shifter, live-sampling, and the exotic-sounding Indonesian oscillator box, while Ewart blows various saxophones and bamboo flutes, as well as reciting lugubrious poems, which may contain some kind of “warning” to the modern world in among its sinister mutterings, odd metaphors, and barely-subdued anger. This has led Schick to dub this release “A narration and cultural/socio-ecological critique of our time that has … not lost any of its relevance and urgency.” There’s a lot honesty and emotion in Ewart’s playing, and his words, but somehow not a great deal of force behind it, as though his energy were being dissipated in these rather lengthy, languorous workouts. (OCT 2023)