GEORGE LEWIS & SPLITTER ORCHESTER - REVIEWS
George Lewis and The Splitter Orchester's Creative Construction Set is another compelling collaboration. AACM member, computer music composer and trombonist Lewis operates in a space somewhere within and beyond jazz, but the music generated by this collaboration is light years from any discernible idiom.
Creative Construction Set is a text based score system that Lewis originally developed with The AACM. These text-scores generate Creative Construction Sets 1, 2 and 3. Aside from devising the compositions Lewis also plays trombone and electronics.
Creative Construction Set begins with the third. An exploration of amplitude and dynamic range, the piece opens with the cold alloys of a gong, a shriek of breath filtered through brass tubes, bright beams of flute, violin glissandi and stentorian brass. This develops into a fitful rhythmic motive that recedes briefly before re-erupting violently with clangorous percussion and guitar and a purring brass monstrosity. For all the high amplitude acoustic violence, the most shocking moments are where a soft, semi-conventional, melodic mode is pursued; a beautiful tremulous motive for strings and flute that is the encapsulation of a shiver; chirruping flute trills in a siege of silence; a call and response dialogue between zippy electronics and brass chords. It ends with a baritone drone and sweet pizzicato guitar and piano gestures.
The second track is the first set. It opens with a field recording of an urban space flecked with cymbal washes. Double bass pizzicato drops the listener into a hardy percussive exchange that gradually eases into a more intimate and nebulous territory. The field recordings return, a loop of almost nothing rotates, and piano provides a meandering walking bass line while woodwinds swoop like gulls.
Somewhat confusingly the third track on the CD is the second set, which creeps into being gently. I say creep since it has a stealthy and sinister quality to its movement that eventually yields to a thrillingly aggressive percussive exchange. Its odd combination of tranquility and brutal viscerality recalls Toru Takemitsu's film scores for the Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara. A cruelly beautiful meld of orchestral instrumentation, tape, electronics and extended technique that evokes an irrational, uncanny and primeval sense of dread. Yet its violence is also comic, which is entirely apposite to the ludicrous, ominous and vicious world we exist in. However, in their mass collaborative, process-based openness, Splitter Orchester offer a prefigurative model of how that world could change. It's both a thrilling and inspiring proposition.
- Richard Thomas, The Wire -
George Lewis & Splitter Orchester's Creative Construction Set makes connections between the new German Echtzeitmusik scene and America's Great Black Music.
Echtzeitmusik is a Berlin-centric but internationally collaborative movement, involving a wide and open caste of musicians who are developing a distinctive new electro-acoustic music. The 23-piece Splitter Orchester is its summit, and George Lewis, on this occasion, is the Orchester's principal, guest musician (trombone, electronics) and composer.
Lewis (b. 1952), a member of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, plays trombone (check his News for Lulu trio with John Zorn and Bill Frisell), innovates in interactive electronic and computer music, and works as composer, conductor and installation artist. He's also the current Professor of American Music at Columbia University. In the past he's worked closely with Anthony Braxton, as well as with groups such as Musica Elettronica Viva, and the Globe Unity and ICP Orchestras. He couldn't be more perfect for the Splitter Orchester.
Lewis' 3-piece Creative Construction Set is a text-based score that evidently allows the players (who include Axel Dörner, Simon James Phillips, Werner Dafeldecker and Burkhard Beins) considerable autonomy, while also imposing a structure that's produced a remarkably nuanced and finely calibrated set.
The album was recorded over two days in broadcaster SWR's studios, retaining the immediacy of a live performance. Its three parts, (each around 20 minutes long) are presented out of sequence, with the densest and most changeably dynamic piece, Creative Construction Set #3, opening the album before we're returned to #1 and #2. #1 seems to me the best way in though, kicking off as it does with urban field recordings, taped human voices that are soon commingling with orchestrated instrumentation.
And orchestrated is the word: brass instruments sounding off against dramatic percussives in controlled detonations before yielding to the egoless equilibrium of mutual conduction: the piece, Lewis explains: "proceeds by way of text instructions that ensemble members propose to each other during a performance". So the flow is restless and constantly animated, with lots of little stress tensions bound together in the improvised engineering of a coherent musical architecture.
The players each make their mark, and there's a heightened sensitivity, moment to moment, to specific instruments or combinations (pianist Simon James Phillips insinuates a lovely, pacifying melodic motif into the latter stages of Creative Construction Set #1), but the real pleasures of this listening are in their aggregation, and the fine balance the Orchester strikes between viscerality and sensitivity; the play of skittish microsound against bolder gestures.
Creative Construction Set #2, which closes the album, is increasingly slow, deep and coagulant. It has a brooding, ominous quality, but enfolds brittle turntablism, an exquisite looping effect in brittle strung wood stresses, contrastingly deep and breathy brass and woodwind sounds, and the occasional violent irruption of percussive clatter amid much beautifully stressed delicacy.
Orchester members Boris Baltschun and Burkhard Beins, in trio with Serge Baghdassarians, recorded one of the highlights of 2016 in the shape of Future Perfect, and that album might make a better introduction to Echtzeitmusik for the uninitiated, but the revolutionary dynamics of Creative Construction Set take us deeper.
- Tim Owen, Dalston Sound -
One of two new albums from Berlin's Splitter Orchestra (the other being Shine On You Crazy Diagram with Felix Kubin), Creative Construction Set is a collaboration with AACM member, trombonist and computer music composer George Lewis. Splitter Orchestra brings together composer-performers from the Echtzeitmusik scene, an improvised and experimental music network which emerged in the mid-90s. Lewis has his roots in free jazz and new music, but with the Splitter Orchestra he operates beyond any recognisable idiom. I could call Creative Construction Set electro-acoustic improv, but that threatens to reduce it to a series of now-familiar practices and sounds. This performance succeeds in transporting the listener to an alter-dimension. That's partly down to the skill of the musicians in rendering familiar elements uncanny through extended techniques and electronic manipulation, but it's also down to the expert use of space, texture and dynamics: this is a fully realised soundworld, rather than a loose aggregation of effects.
It begins faintly, with Lewis breathing through his trombone over a sliver of a sine wave. This impressionistic tone painting gradually becomes busier and noisier, until we're in the midst of the hiss, splat and clang of a cyborg wrestling match that's gotten out of hand. There's the clatter and squelch of flesh on metal as bodies are flung against the ropes and slammed down onto the canvas. The umpires step in with ray guns and electric cattle prods, subduing the warring parties with juddering zaps of high voltage. As this stramash continues, a plangent piano figure plays faintly under it all, like exit music intended to pacify the crowd. The second half offers fleeting glances of guitar buzz and twanging strings, but is mainly characterised by the interplay between sustained brass and woodwind tones, and ragged bursts of electronics and percussion.
- Stewart Smith, The Quietus -
Splitter Orchester is a Berlin-based international collective of about 25 composers and improvisers.
All of them are into new music and improvisation. This initiative started in 2010, rooted in the
'Echtzeitmusik'-scene in Berlin. All members are based (from time to time) in Berlin. Simultaneously
they are present in Berlin for at least one occasion: the yearly Splitter Music Festival. On this festival
for contemporary orchestral music they perform as the Splitter Orchester. 'Creative Construction
Set' documents their collaboration with AACM member George Lewis, trombonist and much more.
He started in the mid-70s playing a lot with Anthony Braxton in those days. Later he became a
pioneer in technology and computer music. Gradually the trombone became less important and
Lewis was more and more into composing and improvising and everything in between. He composed
'Creative Construction Set' as a framework or starting point for a musical meeting. He offers
structures that define a specific space for free improvisation. For example his set of rules get the
improvisers all play in serving role, contributing to the whole. It is not about profiling solo
improvisers showing their virtuosity etc. No this music moves along as one giant entity, somehow
framed by what Lewis handed to the musicians. Although there is plenty of room for improvisation,
it often sounds as if it is composed music. It shows Lewis is really one who pushes on the
boundaries, shaping sounds into huge constellations. The music is much about change in dynamics.
There are many dramatic movements and eruptions while this vast and massive stream of sounds
follows it way. Although this music depends on lots of extended techniques, computers, balancing
acoustic and electronics sources, etc., all this didn't bother me while listening. The music made me
forget from what and how it is produced. It is played sensitive and has depth. Yes, this captivating
and engaging music. Recorded in Stuttgart by the way - not in Berlin - in the SWF-Studios in
2015.
- Dolf Mulder, Vital Weekly -
With the end of 'Creative Construction Set #3' - actually track one - looming into view, a lusty chorale bellows out from the depths of the Splitter Orchester and you begin to suspect that, during the previous 20 minutes, you've been listening to a sequence of extrapolations and rippling consequences - and only now are you hearing the consequential thing from which all this material was being extrapolated. Whether it's quite that simple in reality is open to question. George Lewis' pieces for the Berlin-based Splitter Orchester use a Byzantine system of cue cards to keep a flow of information percolating through the orchestral ranks. Just as moments of grand announcement feel inevitable, or that the music might be coalescing around routine patterns, one of the musicians will deal a wild card from the bottom of the pack - thus rebooting the structure. An intriguing paradox underlies this music: the distinctive character of the Splitter Orchester depends on individually-minded improvisers being prepared to colour the collective. The occasional audible Axel Dörner, George Lewis or Michael Thieke aside is welcome - but when conventionally stacked violin arpeggios emerge at the end of 'Creative Construction Set #2' you realise how deeply Lewis' pieces have reconfigured our expectations of how music behaves.
- Philip Clarke, Jazzwise -
Das Splitter Orchester, gegründet im April 2010 von Clare Cooper, Clayton Thomas und Gregor Hotz, verfolgt das Ziel ein in Berlin einmaliger Klangkörper zu sein, der die stilistisch vielseitige lokale Echtzeitmusik-Szene repräsentiert. Hauptansatz des 24-köpfigen Orchesters ist die freie Improvisation, auf deren Grundlage ihre Stücke entstehen und im anschließenden Arbeitsprozess Methoden und Praktiken des Komponierens und Improvisierens zu analysieren und in Kontext zu setzen.
Seit seiner Gründung 2015 konnte das Splitter Orchester einige Konzerte spielen und mit unterschiedlichen Komponisten zusammenarbeiten. Nun haben Sie "Creative Construction Set TM", eine dreiteilige Arbeit mit dem amerikanischen Posaunisten George Lewis live umgesetzt. Diese Arbeit wird mit diesem Album vorgelegt (auf 1.000 Stück limitiert).
Die drei jeweils ca. 20 Minuten langen Stücke liegen musikalisch irgendwo zwischen freier Improvisationsmusik und Contemporary Music. Im Gegensatz zu vielen Kollegen lehnen sie sich mit dieser Arbeit jedoch weniger an der Klassik als an den Jazz an. Auch merkt man einen deutlichen Unterschied zu der doch oft kakophonischen Contemporary Music von z.B. Zeitkratzer, in Form von durchaus komponierten Passagen und dementsprechend melodischen Abschnitten. Auch geht das Splitter Orchester sehr viel subtiler vor. Natürlich gibt es auch hier ausufernde, nahezu kakophonische Momente, doch überwiegen die durchaus zerbrechlichen, sehr spartanischen Momente, in denen nur ein Piano oder eine sanfte Perkussion, ein leichter Bläserklang oder sonstige Instrumente quasi allein zu hören sind. Somit ist auch die Stille und der Nachhall der einzelnen Instrumente ein wichtiger Bestandteil dieser Musik.
Creative Construction Set TM bietet knapp 60 Minuten sehr interessante Improvisationsmusik, die sicherlich nicht einfach zugänglich ist, aber gerade für interessierte Neueinsteiger in die Welt der Improvisations- / Contemporary Music durch seine lichten Ansätze gut geeignet ist.
- Wolfgang Kabsch, Musik An Sich -
La Splitter Orchester, formacion con seis anos de antigüedad y compuesta por importantes improvisadores libres como Axel Dörner, Andrea Neumann, Magda Mayas, Werner Dafeldecker, Clayton Thomas o Michael Thieke, conto con la colaboracion del veterano trombonista, compositor e integrante esencial de la AACM George Lewis para desarrollar su musica. Este creo unas composiciones, que el grupo desarrollo por medio de indicaciones textuales escritas entre sus integrantes en plena ejecución de dichas composiciones. El resultado es Creative Construction Set (Mikroton Recordings, 2016) son los Creative Construction Set numeros 1, 2 y 3: composicion?; improvisacion?; comprovisacion?; improcomposicion? Musica, libertad, dialogo y creatividad en todo caso, empleando el espacio que la creatividad y la libertad requieren.
- Pachi Tapiz, Tomajazz -
Der 24-köpfige Klangkörper in Berlin hat sich 2010 zusammengefunden, um sich abseits hierarchischer Strukturen und jenseits der musikalischen Tradition explorativen Prozessformen zu widmen. Gegen eine nach 6 Jahren dennoch vermutete Routine kam Lewis ins Spiel, um sie mit seinem CCS-Baukasten und den alten AACM-Tugenden 'agency, process, emergence, and collectivity' aufzumöbeln. Innerhalb einer Probewoche wurden 'discontinuity' & 'disruption' kommuniziert und drei Sets in orchestraler Echtzeit entfaltet. Elektroakustisch bestückt mit etwa Cello (Anthea Caddy), Computer (Boris Baltschun), Klarinetten (Kai Fagaschinski, Michael Thieke), Kontrabässen (Werner Dafeldecker, Clayton Thomas), Gitarre (Julia Reidy), Piano (Simon James Phillips), Posaunen (Matthias Müller, Lewis selber), Trompeten (Liz Allbee, Axel Dörner), Turntables (Ignaz Schick) und Tonband (Marta Zapparoli). Dazu Tuba (Robin Hayward) und Kontrabassklarinette (Chris Heenan) für das Subwoofing und Flöten (Sabine Vogel) sowie Geige (Biliana Voutchkova) für die Klangspitzen. Lewis hat ja schon mit etwa The NOW Orchestra, dem Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra oder The Monash Art Ensemble seine Vorstellungen realisiert, ein Kollektiv zu organisieren. Beim als organloser Körper verfassten Splitter Orchester erstaunt dennoch die Geschlossenheit quicker Bewegungen und Verwerfungen und die Effektivität von Hell-Dunkel-, Dicht-Locker-, Forciert-Entspannt-Kontrasten, wofür allein schon das Sammelsurium der Perkussionisten (Burkhard Beins, Steve Heather, Morten J. Olsen) Bände spricht, von Putzwolle bis zu Abrissbirne. Ein wirksames Mittel ist das bruitistische Auffächern eines Klangzwielichts, wobei sich auch Luftlöcher auftun, in denen Stecknadeln rieseln und Flöhe husten, und dann auch Clavinet (Magda Mayas) oder Inside Piano (Andrea Neumann) spuken. Der noch größere Clou ist freilich, dass die molekulare, feingliedrige Bewegtheit dieser schrill keckernden, knörknurrenden, knisterbröselnden Kakophilie weder Rumms noch Bumms, weder Rausch noch Kater scheut. Als hätte Lewis die 'Obergrenze' in den Köpfen ausradiert.
- Rigobert Dittmann, Bad Alchemy -
Occasionally an album comes along, the depths of which I can tell from the first few minutes will probably take me a lifetime to fathom - Creative Construction Set is such an album...such an album...
Where to begin? How about the fact that I've spent the last couple of hours painting...not the walls, but the paper designed for painting images onto, any images, abstract, representational, figurative...you know, art things. Which tells you nothing about this album...although it does, in a way, because it tells you that by mentioning my act of painting I don't know how to begin to describe Creative Construction Set...so how about a comparison between sound and images? Maybe. This is abstract art of the highest degree. Perhaps I even paint in a similar fashion to the way the Orchester and George Lewis make music...improvisational...no fixed idea of what will emerge but...an approach in mind, in place, the bare bones or foundation of what will take shape...
George Lewis has been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, in case you were wondering. Now you know. Knowing nothing of the artists is no bad thing...no preconceptions. That knowledge didn't prepare me for this album. Not much can...
Amid the multi-instrumental fragmentary (pointillist?) sonic marks Lewis' trombone will intermittently rise up, leviathan-like...to ride, or cut through, a sea of bowed, plucked, snatched, blown, tapped instruments...sometimes a clatter in unison, brief punctuation...breaks in which the brass throws a mournful blanket over/under everything...the crackle of static, a stylus stuck...fluttering breath through a trumpet? scraping toward climactic crescendos then nanosecond silence, tape delay, loop, computer clicks, bubbles, squeaks, little wooshes, piano chords, miniscule melodic runs, brushes on drums...
If the underlying tone is somewhat mournful, the tapestry of sounds constantly crackle with life, sometimes joining to form dense matter during what feels like free falling through time and space, each star emitting points of light to form a cosmic display which, as I suggested at the start, cannot be comprehended in a single trip. A stunning album.
- Robin Tomens, Include Me Out -
[ back to overview ] [ details ]
