BLACK CURRENT - REVIEWS
A contemporary improv trio from Berlin with the seemingly rather basic instrumentation of two percussionists and a trumpet player, what they manage to make between them is much more than one could ever imagine. Part of this is due to the trumpet player using his instrument in many abnormal ways, making it blurt and gurgle as well as playing it normally. The percussion range is wide too, much more than drums. So, what first looks like free jazz is more sonic art and very avant-garde.
- Audion Magazine -
The Berlin trio Sawt Out was founded in 2015 and consists of Burkhard Beins and Michael Vorfeld on percussion and Mazen Kerbaj on trumpet. When these three improv greats are not turning heads with their acclaimed concerts, they also go into the studio every now and then. 'Black Current' for the label Al Maslakh, jointly run by Kerbaj and Sharfi Sehnaoui between Berlin and Beirut, is their second album after their self-titled debut from 2018. The three of them carefully set individual accents in order to create slowly developing dynamics together.
- Kristopher Cornils, Field Notes -
The Berlin-based improvisational trio Sawt Out - trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj and percussionists Burkhard Beins and Michael Vorfeld, each one with his distinct set of percussive instruments and devices - began to work in 2015. This trio has shaped and refined their rich and detailed acoustic textures, based on an array of personal extended techniques and an almost telepathic interplay. Sawt Out has also a Plugged version where Beins plays analog synths, samples and walkie-talkies, Kerbaj plays crackle synth, trumpet, toys and radio and Vorfeld plays light bulbs and electric switching devices.
Black Current is the sophomore album of this innovative trio, following the self-titled album from 2018 released by Malaysian label Herbal Records. The trio, augmented by Lebanese bassist Tony Elieh released its Plugged album Machine Learning on Bocian in 2022. The new album was recorded at Ausland in Berlin in July 2020, after a short tour of Sawt Out, and is released by the Lebanese label Al Maslakh, co-founded by Kerbaj, who also did the artwork and design for this album, as he did for the first album and all albums of this label. The album is released in a limited edition of 300 vinyl and download option.
The debut album of the trio offered a representation of its live performances with sudden changes in its dynamics and machine-like precision. Black Current takes a different approach and suggests how the different ideas and approaches of these three idiosyncratic improvisers emerge and flow at a completely unpredictable pace, and how often the trio becomes a tight sonic entity where instrumental origins become blurred. Kerbaj, Veins and Vorfeld rarely play on their respective instruments in a remotely conventional manner and all focus on shaping and sculpting sounds, individually and as a collective. On this album, they do it at a slower, almost psychedelic-like dream-state pace but more chaotic and tense on the ironically titled "Zone Restreinte", and methodically add more intriguing layers to the delicate, yet mysterious and otherworldly textures. The four detailed and fragile pieces may give the impression of one collective brain being distributed among these three musicians, where each slight change of a musical element directly affects all the others.
- Eyal Hareuveni, Salt Peanuts -
Small sounds in Berlin from Sawt Out
I know plenty of non-Berliners that find the city's decades-long embrace of such small gestural improvisation quite amusing, and I would agree that, in general, this practice is played out. Few working ensembles in Berlin embody the city's old-school lowercase improv aesthetic like Sawt Out, a trio with percussionists Burkhard Beins and Michael Vorfeld and trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj. They've been at this game for years, so it's no surprise that they operate with an elevated sense of telepathy, slowly improvising long-form structures built from unified sound building, but punctuated with endless, elusive details. A couple of weeks ago the trio released its second album Black Current (Al Maslakh) and it's been a pleasure to get lost in its microscopic rigor and almost hypnotic beauty.
Beins and Vorfeld are masters at creating hydroplaning textures, exploiting the deep resonance and gentle tinkling of metallic percussion, through bowing, sustained friction, and more conventional means. They lay down a rich fabric for Kerbaj to splay out unpitched breaths pushed through his trumpet; flickers and drops of sound that alternately seem like beads of water sizzling into the air on a hot cast iron skillet or a lapidary mosaic translated into striated, tart circular breathing excursions. Sawt Out reminds us there is more to be mined from drilling down and digging even deeper. It's not as if the new album, which was recorded at Ausland back in July of 2020, will appear radical in its stripped-down methods, but there's a purity and focus that's hard not to admire, and giving in completely to the experience of listening yields some genuinely transportive dividends. Below you can hear the lengthy opening piece, "After the Rain," which seems to have no connection to the John Coltrane tune.
- Peter Margasak, Nowhere Street -
Sawt Out's Black Current is an LP of surreal soundscape and collage,
which immediately recalled the darkly dreamlike energy of Nurse With
Wound. It is their 3rd album since debuting in 2018.
It's a largely quiet album which presents the listener with a subtle
panorama of rustling, breathing, rattling and gusts of air, a plethora of
sounds that could be created incidentally, either by living organisms or
by industrial machinery. The experience of hearing it is not unlike
awakening in a disoriented state, surrounded by sounds without
knowing their origin. The first piece, in particular, seems to draw from
albums like "Homotopy to Marie".
At times I hear what sounds like a train stopping, and a sort of metallic wailing that could be a misused
violin or a protesting piece of bent metal. The metallic tones paired with a sort of monastic pacing and
meditative energy remind me of the work of Organum (David Jackman), who brought an unlikely
spirituality to the sounds of the industrial human environment.
The second side begins with the introduction of some percussion: cymbals, woodblocks, and a big
booming bass drum, played thoughtfully with a ritual affect. With a density of anxious cymbal taps, and
not nearly as many disembodied or unidentifiable sounds as on side A, and , the track starts feeling
closer to a free jazz improvisation.
Recommended particularly for fans of post-industrial ambient collage artists like Nurse With Wound, Irr.
App (ext), Illusion of Safety or Andrew Liles. It falls short of the absolute strangeness of the
aforementioned groups, but it's a pleasantly immersive slice of glimmering, cavernous, ambiguous
magical ambient that brings fragments of the dream state into the waking world. Anyone open to
textural sound experiments could potentially find it enjoyable, provided they are willing to accept a lack
of rhythmic or melodic structure, and an emphasis on the richness of individual sounds resonating
against a backdrop of darkness.
- Josh Landry, Music Machine -
In the context of this album that is deployed in the field
of improvisation, there is an interesting the quote from
Ben Watson (British writer) that is included in the book
'Audio Culture…' (Continuum, 2004): "Free improvisation
is almost by definition outsider music, opposed to
capitalist business-as-usual. Improvisers want to explore
the possibilities of the instant - in this space, using these
instruments, with this audience (or lack of it) ... Free
improvisation doesn't guarantee any particular sound or
mood, it produces a question mark rather than a commodity."
The album opens with 'After the Rain' - a long-form 18
minutes long with a trumpet which displays a processed,
highly compressed sound that comes out almost in
spurts. While this is happening, the beating on kick-
drums alternates with ringing bells and rubbing against
objects. 'Breite Schmurchel' begins with an expectant
silence but as the track progresses, the percussion
becomes more overwhelming, creating a certain tension.
In 'Zone Restreinte' deploys tinkling of light bulbs,
clanging cymbals, deep whistles and knocks on sound
objects. The trumpet emerges and submerges babbling
some sounds while strings can be listen to that provide
rough and raw textures. 'Teshrin Al Awwal' in wavering
tones the drums and cymbals weave a dialogue with the
strings that are rubbed and plucked, alongside electronic
textures that at times approach silence, when suddenly
the percussion spreads and subtle bells and objects
resonate with a wide range of timbres.
Sawt Out deploys a varied instrumentation and sound
objects that create moments of confusion and silence,
two contrasting but at the same time complementary
moments that reveal a music full of rich nuances and
unexpected sounds. (best rating)
- Guillermo Escudero, Loop.cl -
Black Current is the second album from the trio Sawt Out - Burkhard Beins & Mazen Kerbaj & Michael Vorfeld - after Sawt Out (released on Herbal out of Malaysia, reviewed here in March 2019). The latter, recorded in 2016, had already taken a couple of years to appear (& at the time, I waited on the mail too...), and that's true of the followup as well, recorded in Berlin over three days in July 2020 (i.e. not long after the pandemic began) & released last week on Kerbaj's Al Maslakh label (in vinyl & 24bit download). I'd been fascinated by the aggressive acoustic-but-closely-mic'd sound combinations of the first album, which is also rather loud: The longest, first track was then the most intriguing tapestry, while the subsequent offerings were both more shrill & involved less procedural variety. One might even consider a punk vibe there.... That's not really the case with Black Current though, as this second album is more mellow & nuanced - although there're still sometimes e.g. resonant lines of flight. In this, the clearest comparison for me is surely the trio album Induction, recorded by Beins in the interim (2019) with John Butcher & Werner Dafeldecker - who also mastered the Sawt Out albums. Kerbaj's "acoustics" approach on the horn might thus be compared to Butcher's there, although the latter tends to retain more of a jazz reference, i.e. in terms of calls & contours, while the former forges a more thorough instrumental deconstruction. In any case, Black Current (perhaps as reflected in the title) can still feel electronic at times, especially via its rubbed percussion. There's also a sense of balance, not quite minimalistic, that again projects a kind of ritual austerity. (There's some low vocalizing eventually as well, in a sort of gathering of sonic layers.... The entire production ends up being much less "in your face.") The sense of ritual also seems to reflect a naturalistic stance, with a feeling of outdoor impressionism (including from the track titles). Yet there's also (always, still...) a sense of closeness & intimacy from this trio, via a kind of affective folding in upon itself.... On the other hand, most of the processes involved remain rather simple, relying at times more on sonic novelty than formal development. Each track then presents as a careful sound sculpture, often in held-yet-dynamic tones, sometimes suggesting stark landscapes....
There's a sense then that I'm anticipating more development of style from Sawt Out, i.e. to continue to put "more" into these albums, both in terms of timbral nuance & varied form.... It turns out, though, that the trio had already reformed itself as "Sawt Out Plugged," and released a CD-format album (on Poland's Bocian Records) in November that I hadn't noticed: Recorded in Berlin in August 2021 (i.e. after Black Current), Machine Learning involves a quartet, adding Tony Elieh (electric bass) to the original trio - who now largely abandon their acoustic instruments in favor of electronics. (And I'd heard Elieh e.g. on his 2017 solo album from Al Maslakh, It's Good To Die Every Now And Then: He likes to explore the deepest registers in haunting waves.) The result is a crackling cacophony, plus deep bass at times, never really overwhelming, but also largely procedural & novelty-based. In fact, the obvious reference for me is very much The Inflatable Leviathan (recorded in May 2021) by a completely unrelated US quartet, as recalled in the previous entry. (Listening in preparation for these two entries at once, I became confused about which project was which, actually getting mixed up between hearing Machine Learning & The Inflatable Leviathan on two occasions....) Anyway, Machine Learning can also be somewhat repetitive at times (pace the sonic novelty), and of course largely separates the musicians from their remarkable command of "deconstructed" acoustic instruments, i.e. particularly in dynamically extending held tones per above.... (So the credits are now quite long, involving synths, walkie-talkies, radio, light bulbs, etc. There's also a clear "pop vocal" sample to close the album.) I'd actually then compare Machine Learning further to various e.g. Mikroton releases from the previous era, i.e. polyphonic tapestries of "broken" electronics.... But there's also something of the same spirit from Black Current, albeit now without the ritual air - or maybe it's a different sort of ritual. Anyway, Machine Learning actually seems like a more preliminary album again.
- Todd Mc Comb, Medieval.org Jazz Archive -