THE SEALED KNOT: Live at Cafe Oto - REVIEWS
The Sealed Knot are one of the great free improvisation groups, comparable to the classic 1980s SME line-up of John Stevens, Nigel Coombes and Roger Smith for edge-of-your-seat attentiveness and sheer inter-group telepathy. Rhodri Davies, Mark Wastell and Burkhard Beins have been a unit since 2000, a melding of London and Berlin. Recent sightings have been rare, but they played in Berlin this May, and now Wastell's revived Confront label is releasing this live album from January 2009.
The purpose of the 2009 show was to celebrate Another Timbre's release of And We Disappear, recorded live in Switzerland at a 2007 festival titled Ear We Are. That album was about the yawning gulf between Davies's high, piercing ebow work and Wastell's glacial double bass. Whereas the new record has Wastell switching to tam tam, and all three musicians employing electronics - but lo-fi mechanical electronics, rather than digital processing. So there's a pleasing, subdued industrial fury lurking beneath the music. Filigrees of rapid clicking make way for subterranean pulsing, and Beins adds the super-pure tones of bowed cymbals, to blur the electric/acoustic distinction further. Around 18 minutes the group contemplate silence, before launching into a further 13 minutes of patient exploration and metallic mystery.
Wastell has grumbled that critics are "always 12 months behind the flow" when it comes to describing what musicians are up to, and here he is, helping us along by releasing a four year old recording. Never mind that the trend-buzz around Lower Case Improv, New London Silence & co has worn off; with music of this quality we're dealing with simple excellence, and any opportunity to see this group at work should be seized.
- Clive Bell, The Wire -
Speaking of history, I'd no idea about the derivation of the Sealed Knot. It's always a pleasure to hear the work of this fine trio, but with Wastell having long since switched over to tam tam and all three employing electronics and the resultant sound is entirely apart. We're now into long sounds (though I'm somehow hesitant to refer to it as drones), individual strings sustaining for many seconds but extremely varied in pitch and timbre and, for lack of a better term, particulate nature, while always remaining soft. The use of finely chosen long tones combined throughout with an array of quiet, rapid, gently percussive sounds makes this set, again perfectly circumscribed at about 1/2 hour, work so well. Despite the delicacy, the effect on the whole becomes very rich and reverberant, reminding me a bit of Rowe's solo music circa 2004 but with distance between the elements; there's a strong feeling of three-ness here, fantastic levels of detail. after a (luscious) lull mid-piece, there's a sudden and surprising three-note electronic-fuzz figure as the churning music edges darker by a few degrees before fading into some hollow percolation and wheeze.
An excellent recording, one of my favorites of the year. Welcome back, Confront.
- Brian Olewnick, Just Outside -
A health-improving certification of a set from 2009, when The Sealed Knot performed at the Another Timbre festival. Just over 31 minutes that manage once more to transfer an awareness of existential foregone conclusions, changelessly related by this writer to the gravity of protracted tones supported by a "disciplined" semi-subterranean imbalance. This renders extended stretches of stratified frequencies the closest thing to disconnecting from the senses, in spite of those very senses intensifying their receptivity in the process.
The realization of a room filling up with acoustic conditions immediately detected as recuperative is one of the most breathtaking intuitions experienced by a primed listener. Certain records - Live At Cafe Oto unquestionably belonging there - instantly light up the bulbs of private absorption and proportional willingness to be subjected to a thorough unification with an encompassing vibrancy. The immaterial nearness characterizing the instrumentalists’ attitude portrays their actions as veritable orbits of undulation; despite the overall density, we're still allowed a coup d'oeil at what someone is doing in given junctures. An integrity permeated with wisdom incidental to vital principles and researching pertinacity. There is no way of falling in the trap of undignified instant-by-instant chronicling, a nearly offensive act in analogous occasions.
I will restrict myself and tell you that the "huge cat purr" anterior to the eventual silence is alone worth of securing a copy of this item, which comes lodged in a sturdy metal box. It’s nice to see Confront reactivated after such a long time; and as I’m enjoying a 48-hour continuum with this concise marvel, nothing attempting to affect my ephemeral calmness gets relevant enough. We're (almost) all diminutive derivations of the proverbial Big Note, hopefully returning there at last; Beins, Davies and Wastell are brilliant path-finding guides, providing a necessary admonishment about everything else's ineffectualness.
- Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes -