Heavy woodwind action going down on Quantum Teleportation (NAKAMA RECORDS NKM023) courtesy of Klaus Ellerhusen Holm and Andreas Røysum, both Norwegian players and equipped with various clarinets and a saxophone.
Holm surfaced here in 2018 with Dayton’s Bluff, where (with David Stackenas) a hybrid of free playing with pastoral folk was assayed on that atmospheric item. Røysum appeared on Ulme on the Motvind label as one third of Miman. At first gazoon, I assumed that the duo were employing studio effects to achieve endless looped echoes on their work here, but I was completely wrong about that. Titles such as ‘Entanglement in the Bell State’ and ‘Angular Momenta’ are what led me into error, as I foolishly told myself these were oblique references to the latest audio software tools. In fact, Holm and Røysum are doing something clever and displaying a fine awareness of acoustics – no electronic interventions at all in fact – and by presenting the same material played in different locations in Trondheim, and perhaps through a little editing afterwards, they achieve their effects.
It’s done with alto sax, bass clarinet, and Bb clarinet, and may involve “multiphonics, tonal structures and micro tonality”, we are informed…they go so far with these ideas that they claim a lineage, or at least a resemblance, with two other major musical genres that have gone before. One of these is American minimalism, perhaps inviting us to recall the ways in which Terry Riley looped and echoed his saxophone and his electric organ in the 1960s. I always hoped he did it with a Copycat echo or similar hefty piece of analogue gear, but no such boxes in play on this record where in fact what we hear is the impression of loops, all hand-crafted by acoustic means. The other one is Berlin electronica of the 1990s, a strain which I find harder to detect on the grooves of Quantum Teleportation, but perhaps it’s something to do with restraint, hard edges, and unexpected gaps. You will find all of these qualities on ‘Dharani No. 4’ in the space of two minutes. Though they might be elsewhere on the record also, if you can activate your sensors to locate them.
I like the inscrutable visage presented by these audio riddles, but there’s not a good deal of warmth or humanity on this rather “clever” and self-satisfied record. There’s a vinyl version as well as the CD and both instances have a die-cut cover with holes, invoking the suggestion of an excerpt from a physics lecture on the chalkboard. (31/10/2023)