Recovery Suite by David Ross & Clive Bell

(please note there are still a handful of copies from the original vinyl release available from http://www.iniitu.net/index_iniitu.htm)

This unusual record will take you through some derouting mazes, evoking at times the perplexity and obfuscation of the experience of illness and slow, uncertain recovery. It’s free music, but not in the free jazz way.

Maybe it’s dystopic lounge ambiance, with evanescent melodic lines on the shakuhachi and circular undertones. Sometimes bleak, brooding, fractured and gloomy; at other moments rather delicate, elaborate and lush.

A nocturnal record, where melancholy and aching is slowly dissolved by a sprawling confidence, where mental landscapes are built on the contemplation of opioid numbness and extraction therefrom.

(from the press release from the original vinyl release on ini.itu records)

Recovery Suite is an unusual recording in a number of ways. Firstly, it combines two disparate sound worlds – the “natural” sound of the shakuhachi, and the “artificial” world of electronically-generated and -manipulated sound – and deliberately questions their apparent antithesis. It also questions the nature of the recorded medium – in the days of mp3 files or CD recordings, the album has been released as a vinyl pressing, an art work not stored in digital form, and thus not inherently open to immediate and unlimited duplication. It is an object, tangible and thus more than a transient presence. Apart from its musical qualities, this lends the recording an intrinsic value, which is enhanced by the limitation to a production run of 250 copies (according to the press release).

So what is this unusual music? The press release suggests that David Ross initiated the project while bedridden and recovering from a back injury; during this time, the only instrument he could play was electronics. Clive Bell was later drawn into the project as shakuhachi-player and co-composer. Given the circumstances, the subject matter of the pieces is not surprising; they all relate to aspects of illness in various forms – physical as well as mental – reflected in the titles (such as “Trauma Unit”, “Locusts of Analgesia”, or “Recovery”).

Broadly speaking, the sound world reflects these themes; the electronic sounds, often in the form of loops, are reminiscent of, but by no means limited to, the sonic texture of medical electronics in an intensive-care unit – bleeps, hums, drones. The shakuhachi, which does not appear on every track, is nevertheless also drawn into this world. Its sounds are often ambivalent, ranging from noise, through tonally uncertain sustained notes with dynamic shifts of pitch and vibrato, through to trills and techniques (such as korokoro) which are clearly related to the shakuhachi canon.

While the shakuhachi has a clear canon on which its contribution is based, there is no such standard repertoire for the electronic elements. According to the press release, David Ross plays a customized analogue oscillator, known as a “Drosscillator”. Judging by the nature of the sounds produced, this is a rather complex instrument, allowing for a broad range of manipulation of pitch, timbre and dynamics, from subtle distortion and filtering of sound, through to generation of non-harmonic overtone structures (presumably though ring modulation and frequency modulation), as well as percussive drum, cymbal and gong sounds. In fact, the sound world of the electronics is reminiscent of that produced by Buchla series synthesizers; although no technical details are given, it would not surprise me if the Drosscillator were conceptually related to these instruments. (This is by no means intended as a denigration, but rather as a compliment to the richness and warmth of the sound world produced, and as an aid for those with a background in music synthesis to imagine the sonic atmosphere of the record.) It is also apparent that either the Drosscillator contains many oscillators and signal processing units, or that a process of multitracking has been employed in making the record; the press release and record cover provide no clues as to whether any multitracking was carried out in the digital domain, or using an analogue tape recorder, which would be conceptually consistent with the release on an analogue medium (LP record).

The combined sound world of shakuhachi and electronics tends, in this recording, to have something of a dream-like character. For some of the tracks, the term “nightmare” might be more appropriate; Ross and Bell have included the uncomfortable and disturbing elements of illness in their music. Drawing influences from free improvisation and loop composition (often with electronic percussion loops and drones which cast a nod to the electronica scene without being limited to the musical syntax of that genre), the pieces tend to come and go as open forms, and dream-like discontinuities and shifts of material and texture are common. The result is not aesthetically “rounded” or “satisfying” in the sense that, for instance, Western classical music aims at aesthetic polish; rather, it is disturbing, without being “threatening” – and above all, it is fascinating, drawing the listener in.

Despite the openness of the forms of many of the tracks, there is nevertheless a clear level of structural thinking in the pieces’ composition. This is demonstrated particularly in the exploration of the relationship between the sound worlds of the shakuhachi and the electronics, which is (in my perception) an important aspect of the project. The apposite questions are: do these sound worlds meet and merge? And if so, how? The answer to the first question, I believe, is “yes”, and I consider this to be one of the successes of the recording. Of the eleven tracks on the LP (the last of them without title, a “hidden” bonus track, as it were), three are without shakuhachi, at least in any obvious sense; I won’t exclude the possibility that some of the sounds in these tracks are derived from the shakuhachi by processing which obscures their origin. The others evince various forms of interrelationship: from apparent opposition (at the start of Side A, track 6, “Sleep Healing”), through to a high degree of unification (in Side B, track 4, “Arrhythmia 2″), in which the more or less acoustic sound of the shakuhachi appears to be paralleled by a processed version of the same line (with vibrato, filtering, modification of harmonic content) in textural counterpoint with electronic sounds (gong-like loops, and ethereal, triadic, sustained tones). The tracks which employ shakuhachi with the electronics all locate themselves somewhere on this spectrum; I personally find “Sleep Healing” particularly interesting, as it runs the entire gamut from contrast between shakuhachi and electronics, through to their integration, and the shakuhachi emerges at the end of the piece as the dominant force.

The result of the levels of musical thought and exploration of these diverse sound worlds and their interrelationship is a highly unusual and, I believe, successful recording. The fact that this is a niche work is clearly recognized by the musicians, as evidenced by the production of only 250 copies. Nevertheless, it is an interesting and significant niche work, and the recording deserves to be heard by many more than the 250 people who will eventually own the LP.

(review by Jim Franklin on Shakuhachi Society)

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