SEPULCHERS by Kyle Motl / Rhonda Taylor

Following the tone set by the title, the music on Sepulchers is somber, slow, and almost morbid. Long, quiet gestures prevail throughout, expertly recorded with a level of detail that forces the listener to confront the music up close. We can hear Kyle Motl’s bass and Rhonda Taylor’s saxophone, but we can also hear their bodies – their fingers, their lips, their breath. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which, which I take to be part of the point. The instruments and the bodies bury and exhume eachother, so that you can hear this recording as a document of instruments entombed in people, or people entombed in instruments, or just music making its way to the surface, inching up through centuries of human-intsrument sedimentation.

Amidst these notes of the hereafter, Sepulchers wears a wry smile. If it’s a tomb, it’s the most delightful tomb possible, one whose inhabitants are at most half dead. Perhaps they are former monarchs deposed and executed, grinning up at the clueless priests who had them killed, knowing that they’ll soon return to toy with the living. Glimmers of familiar musical features – tonality, melody, musical storytelling, communication, all those things that critics sometimes call “expressive” – appear fleetingly, made strange and obscure. The uncanny quality of this music, though, is not in its novelty or otherness – though there are plenty of novel sounds here -- but in its weirdly darkened renditions of well-known things. It might take you a while, for example, to figure out just what is so unsettling about Arcane Saws – until you figure out that it is largely in C major. But it’s a strange C major, a pale, spectral reflection of the one everyone knows. As worms and roots for flowers and fruit, this music offers a penumbral vision of everyday beauties uprooted and exposed.

-- Tobin Chodos

Kyle Motl is a bassist, composer, and improviser described as “spectacularly adventurous and dynamic” whose playing is noted for both its “iridescent delicacy as well as abrasive force” (The Wire). His music "promise[s] to change us by revealing things we could never have imagined” (Free Jazz Collective).

Photos by Peter Gannushkin