Sparkling Sessions
Copenhagen
FRANCE FOU RECORDS FR – CD 60 (2024)
In 2020 Jac Berrocal made it to Denmark to play a couple of nights at the “Sparkling Sound Festival 2020” – joined by his compadre Vincent Epplay, the French visual artist who joined him on that memorable Ice Exposure foray (also from 2020). They were joined by various Danish improvisers, and the results are now published as this excellent release with its unsettling Epplay cover art – itself not too far apart from a vintage United Dairies release (which might be the first place some listeners heard the music of the estimable Berrocal).
I always like the way this very free-thinking musician Berrocal manages to slip past conventional categories, even if his muted and treated trumpet might resemble Miles from around the Big Fun period on segments of these recordings. On the first “set” the French team were joined by Jakob Draminsky Højmark (keyboards) and Jørgen Teller (vocals), calling themselves Tzarina Re-Tuned, and what emerges is a sluggish creeping sponge of rootless, chordless miasma, where in amongst the treacherous echo effects and glommarific drones, Berrocal slithers like a greased-up centipede. Precious seconds of vocal absurdist poetry are placed at start and reappear at the close of this 15-min delirium, very reminiscent of the radio poems from Orphée by Jean Cocteau (with the frequent use of the phrase Je répète). After this, all those concerned retired to hotel rooms (Hotel Hotel) after imbibing local wines, we hope, and dreamed the dreams of the truly liberated surrealist, refreshing selves for return next night when they became the Sparkling Sextet – the word’s only sextet with seven players, thereby posing an existential conundrum. Same foursome as above now joined by vocalists Tanja Schlander, Randi Pontoppidan, and synth player Per Buhl Acs.
This one is much more of an indigestion-nightmare of cheese-eating Rarebit fiends, inhabited by multiple speaking and singing voices – including the gruff barks (presumably) of Berrocal himself, and there is much humour and playful antic lurking among the dark recesses. Pontoppidan is especially valuable in this milieu; been enjoying her releases for a few years now and we do cherish her emotionally-articulate and highly intuitive approach to the “voice-improv” thing. Some of the clipped utterances when spoken in English by a male practitioner I mistook at first for Berrocal, but evidently not since trumpet is still playing at same time during these non-overdubbed melanges – these one-word slogans and free-form expositions put one in mind of Jean-Luc Godard during that brief pre-Vietnam period when his dialogue, especially in the mouth of Belmondo, so accurately satirised and deflated all the shiny artefacts of the American dream with a directness that few cineastes have matched. I especially like the description from the label press notes, characterising this concert “avec ses voix hallucinées”. Quelle poetic.
In musical terms, this Sextet session is equally drifty and strange – Epplay’s synth is going into understated overdrive with presumably some help from the Danish contingent Per Buhal Acs – and everyone’s vocal mic is equipped with an ultra-eerie echo setting that produces an instant “De Chirico” dreaming effect. Even the photographs of the set (by H. Jelstrup), in the dim-lit cellar with bare brick walls, contribute to these oneiric impressions – weird shadows, double exposures, dramatic lighting. A gem…aid to sleep and weird nightmares… from 30th April 2024.