Well I worked for a continual fifteen hours overnight, and returned home, in a complete daze at nine this morning. I think I wrote before here about a morning travelllng home and listening to music when so exhausted its hard to even stay conscious, so I won’t do it again, but this morning heading home having not slept for more than twenty-four hours and having just finished a hard night’s work listening to music, or at least trying to, was really hard. I flicked through a few things on my iPod, settling on none of them and in the end switching it off to concentrate on a strong coffee as I sat on the train home. Listening properly when completely exhausted just isn’t possible.

After a few hours sleep,  with a bit of time to myself as the rain hammered against the windows here I chose to sit and read while music played. I re-read the first couple of chapters of Eddie Prevost’s Minute Particulars book, a somewhat controversial volume that I have actually only ever read through the once. Re-reading it now with a bit of time having passed, its core messages made a little more sense to me, though the passages that criticise the use of technology in improvised music are still hard for me to agree with. They made me wonder though, some five years after the book was written if Eddie still feels the same way, particularly in light of his recent musical friendship and collaboration with the likes of Sebastian Lexer, Paul Abbott and Grundik Kasyansky, all members of Prevost’s regular improv workshops. This then reminded me that I have as yet failed to write anything here about Control and its Opposites, the CDr release that came out in May on the Another Timbre label involving Jamie Coleman, Seymour Wright and Grundik Kasyansky. I listened to this CD quite a lot a couple of months back, and enjoyed the experience immensely, but I never got around to sharing any thoughts on the release, partly because its sprawling, eighty minute long expanse of tense improvisation is an awful lot to write about, but also because, for reasons I will go into now, it didn’t feel right to be reviewing the CD.

In Minute Particulars Prevost spends a good detail of time discussing the virtues of a communitarian approach to making improvised music. Certainly the values and ethics of this approach are clear to see in the way the weekly Improv Workshops are run, and the impact that this group of mainly young people has had on the London improvised music scene over recent months has supported this, with London right now a vibrant, questioning, but socially and creative supportive environment for improvised music. One question I have always wondered about Prevost’s theory of music as a way of practicing and moving towards a more communitarian, self-supporting society, is where the role of the listener, or worse, the music critic fits into all of this. Are we part of that community? and if so what is our role within it? Do we matter? Or would the music go on regardless? Like Seymour Wright’s Flat grey marked suspended pole holds tree project with Benedict Drew and Paul Abbott I have felt that Control and its Opposites is in many ways just a glimpse (albeit it quite a long one) of one of many ongoing musical partnerships taking place in London right now that exist purely for the ongoing musical exploration, and would continue just the same if nobody was actually listening. Over recent years, in general there has been a swing towards musicians playing together just with the thought of recording a CD, some kind of solid statement always at the back of their minds. This trio, typical of the mindset common to attendees of the Prevost Workshops just don’t think that way. Coleman, Wright and Kasyansky are all fine, thoughtful, mature musicians with a close, ongoing musical relationship that is built upon frequent meetings to play together, often just in someone’s front room, with no attempt made to record proceedings. Control and its Opposites is a rare record then, made by Simon Reynell in a London church late in April 2009. It reveals the fluid,  flourishing musical dialogue between these three musicians, its eighty minutes like a kind of slice taken from a larger pie. Although the recording session was set up with a CD release in mind, this is not evident from the music.

Listening through to Control… in one sitting is tough going. Across its full length a lot happens, ranging from the relative comfort of the layered textures that open the album through to near silent pregnant moments to screeching blasts of sound to angry little tussles between two or more musicians where the acoustics of Coleman’s trumpet and Wright’s sax are met squarely by the acute placement of Kasyansky’s minimal but powerful electronics. There is an intimacy and a tension right through the disc’s full length, which makes for a tiring listen. Staying focussed throughout the entire piece feels like I am intruding somehow on this close dialogue between the three. Trying to dissect the inspiration or emotion driving any one musician at any one time seems not only difficult but also completely the wrong thing to do. It is not that the music, or musicians are above criticism or appraisal in any way, far from it, but it just feels like (even more than usual) whatever I have to say just doesn’t matter. The music presented feels incredibly organic. honest and clean, untainted by the rules and expectations of an audience, be it in person in the church as they played, or at the other end of the musician to CD listener divide. In places the music really grabs you, pulling you along on the journey with its creators, and at other moments it is harder to penetrate, the individual contributors less easy to identify, the wild fluctuations in dynamic and volume adding extra intrigue.

In general Coleman mainly blows through or onto his instrument, but rarely producing a note as such. Wright is as likely to play his sax as a percussive instrument as much as a wind one, and Kasyansky adds blips, scrapes and hard tones in equal amounts. All three know their instrumentation well however, and the content of the music, rather than its style is what matters here. The music feels very tactile, recently formed, like a sculpture fresh with the fingerprints of its creators before going into the kiln to be fired, before being transformed into a vaguely marketable object. As a listener you are asked to try and join the musicians’ dialogue, try and find a way to meet them and their music at a level that feels comfortable. The onus is on the listener though. While the music on Control… is not harsh or demanding from a purely aesthetic perspective it also assumes a degree of effort that is required of the listener. there is no easy entry point or easy soundbites to get a hold of.

Reviewing Control and its Opposites then feels pointless. Certainly it can be argued that by releasing this music as a CD rather than just performing quietly together out of the public eye the musicians should expect their work, once placed on public view to be assessed, analysed, pulled apart. The thing is, any further analysis beyond recognition and assessment of the music within its context as part of an ongoing musical relationship probably misses the point.  It feels like I am projecting a degree of arrogance onto the musicians here by suggesting that they would play no differently if they thought nobody would hear the music but it is not about ego, more about an ongoing relationship that began before the CD started playing, and continued after. Certainly this could be said for many an improvising group, but this sense of continual discovery through frequent playing, with just an excerpt from one stage of this shown here is, I think a central theme to this release. Its a fine disc anyway, not as a polished object, and not really as a work in progress, as that suggests some kind of finished end product is the eventual goal, which it is not. As a simple view of three fine, close musicians playing together, and nothing more than that however, Control and its Opposites is as good as it gets.