Christian Meaas Svendsen has gone to considerable lengths on his new album Body of Sound Body of Music (NAKAMA RECORDS NKM024CD), a record of solo acoustic bass performances.
It’s all about the body of the instrument and, he wishes to stress, his own human body, a warm carbon-based entity playing this wooden monster in the room. Volume, space, plucking, breathing, wood…To this end he attached microphones to anything that moves – his hands, his chest (to capture his heartbeat) and his voice – not counting the pair of mics in the recording space to capture the music. Few musicians, I would guess, have gone this far with contact mics and gaffer tape, attaching ungainly machines and cables to their own body as if about to be sent out to capture testimony from an unsuspecting mob boss while wearing a “wire” (as seen ad nauseam on Hollywood thriller movies). Perhaps we need to look outside the world of improvised music for a precedent, and turn to performance artists like the maniacal stellarc, although he dreamed of turning himself into a cyborg and didn’t flinch from attaching hoists and cables to achieve his aim.
Apparently this is the second bass-solo record From Svendsen (the first was probably Forms & Poses from 2016) and we’ve mostly tended to hear this highly individual Norwegian player in small-group context, often on his own Nakama label, but quite often the music we hear challenges what we think we know about the many genres of “free improvisation”. That’s pretty much the case here, too; there are moments, like on ‘Joyful Body’ where it becomes more about physical presence and something verging on contortion, as though the player were a very agile acrobat or India-Rubber Man at the circus. With all these taped-on microphones and limbs tied into pretzels, you might be expecting something rather more “extreme” from the music here, when in fact it’s quite approachable and refined, even. Although the experiment is very unorthodox, it does indeed succeed in bringing the listener “closer” to the experience of performance and the “truth” of a physical wooden instrument.
At a time when computer moguls are advising us we can dispense with all that untidy human messiness in favour of virtual this and AI that, a record like this is only to be welcomed. Enclosed booklet includes testimonials and praise from fellow bass-players around the world. (02/04/2024)