MAGNET - Bill Meyer

The Clawed stone

The Clawed Stone is the second recording by English saxophonist John Butcher, German synthesizer player Thomas Lehn and American pianist Matthew Shipp. The trio’s first album,, 2016’s Tangle, was a splendid example of strong contrary vectors converging to create a perfect storm of spontaneous music-making. While Shipp’s output gives no quarter, it derives from recognizable traditions: free jazz, classical music and the language of the piano. Butcher and Lehn are both committed improvisers, and each has worked determinedly against instrumental prescriptions. The former has used soprano and tenor saxes to manage sounds most commonly accessed with the use of electronics, and the latter has confined himself to older, analogue synths that respond to the human touch.
First time around, they didn’t look for common ground, but for ways to each be themselves, and support each other’s efforts to do the same. The rematch brings additional challenge to the fray, as Lehn periodically processes Shipp and Butcher’s playing. The Clawed Stone’s digital studio sound makes the shifts from pure acoustic tones to ear-scouring static especially momentous. But such effects are never played for mere novelty. Interference and disappearance are parts of a tool kit that also includes distinctly personal gestures and contrasting responses. The outcome is music that grips and surprises at every turn.

DALSTON SOUND - Tim Owen

Tangle

Shipp gets the main set -  titled “Cluster” - underway with uncharacteristically bright and rhapsodic style while Lehn conjures up a vinyl loop musical heartbeat. As this underpinning dissolves into abstraction Shipp sounds increasingly unrecognisable, playing brittle single note patterns that Lehn refracts through processing. Butcher joins in, wrapping his partners’ playing in a warm burr, then becomes agitated as Lehn turns to gameboy bleeps and Shipp essays some jaunty abstractions, then slips into a briefly bouncy vamp that soon grows martial and insistent. Butcher,meanwhile, ranges through liquid streams of circular breathing to hollow bell rasping and expressionistic popping and percussive sounds.
After eight minutes of flux Shipp relaxes, and the performance slips into calmer waters. Butcher’s careful feedback and Lehn’s raw signal noise create a muzzy aural smog, but before Shipp re-enters, playing now in a boldly, fluently lyrical style I’ve never heard from him before, Butcher plays a superb, echoic tenor solo.
When Lehn runs interruption with surging interjections of hiss and crackle, the others’ rejoinder is a stream of fast, concise phrases that they stretch out, pushing the bounds. Lehn plays along, tweaking the others’ inputs and channels their energy into a more subdued passage of synth-ghosted pianism. This is unexpectedly classicist, but soon contorts into a noise duet behind a garrulously extrovert passage of saxophony from Butcher.
The ideas are flowing thick and fast, with everyone at the top of their game and perfectly in sync. There’s a raw vitality to the performance, and the music is unabashed and direct in channeling relatively conventional lyricism: Tangle is supremely listenable, and should grab listeners who usually find improvised free music elusive, as well as devotees like me who will lap this up.

“Cluster"‘s third index is more settled at first, despite Shipp’s waves of ominously stentorian lower-register ostinato as Lehn detonates charge after charge of vivifying electroacoustic energy. Lehn then shifts his focus to subtle textures and background processes, while Shipp and Butcher re-combine with renewed zeal. Shipp vents his vigour in compulsive, percussive release while Butcher rips into some ferocious saxophony, sounding not unlike John Zorn in extremis, rocking up to a common elevated plateau for a vigorously dynamic three-way improv with a beautifully modulated resolution.

Presumably hyped at this point, the trio summon more energy for a six minute encore, “Tiefenschärfe”, which has Butcher on point, on tenor sax, picking his way methodically through Lehn’s synth gloaming. When Shipp takes over he plays curt, aphoristic repetitions that Lehn gleefully diffracts through processing and primps with glitch. Butcher comes back in raw-toned on close-mic’d soprano before an alchemical conclusion.

This is thrilling, peerless stuff, played with vivacity and animation. I was at the concert, and in my diary I jotted down a rare post-gig note that reads simply “!!!! f******k”, but I’d forgotten it was quite this good. Kudos to Butcher, Lehn and Shipp for their mix, and to all involved.

POINT OF DEPARTURE - Stuart Broomer

Tangle

Tangle (Fataka 14) was recorded at Café Oto in February 2014, by the trio of Butcher, Thomas Lehn on analogue synthesizers and Matthew Shipp on piano. It might be described as a group operating on a principle of independent insistence. The 37-minute “Cluster” begins with Shipp declaring a series of ascending chords amidst the sound of footsteps, whether evidence of an audience or Lehn’s simulation. His first determinedly electronic sound is a bit of noise that will suggest a defect in a CD or a dusty LP needle. Shipp will frequently turn to repeating patterns, usually chordal, and the combination of his formal insistence (at times it can suggest the decorous exoticism of Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition) and Lehn’s oscillator blasts seem to press Butcher toward a kind of liberated expressionism.

In what may be the year’s most perceptive liner essay, Nate Wooley recalls a conversation once held with band- mates in which he postulated the contrasting poles of style formation, “the accretion of raw ideas and refining a very specific language.” His examples of the predominance of one over the other had been Shipp tending toward “raw accretion” and Butcher “a very specific language.” What Wooley hears here is Butcher “simply shred[ding] with a certain abandon that feels slightly unhinged at points,” and “an obvious sense of architecture in Shipp’s playing here that is shocking in its ability to structure the way we perceive the trio improvisations.” For Wooley, Lehn “can forgo the parts for the whole and create from a distant place: not transcendent or confrontational, just ... indescribable.”

What is remarkable about Tangle is that it isn’t exactly a “tangle”: the distinctions in the musicians’ approaches instead invite a kind of independence of listening (akin to the independence of hands and feet practiced by a trap drummer) in which we follow parts singly, in pairs and as three (or sometimes more depending on the scale of individual activity). The experience is then all the more remarkable when there is evidently intentional interaction among the parts. We’re invited to a benevolent conception of time in which it is conceived as both static and dynamic, both still and moving, like time experienced as two places at once. The final brief track is called “Tiefenschärfe” (“depth of field”), the title suggesting just how we might approach this remarkable music. Butcher’s playing at the outset is as lyrical as Stan Getz.

SALT PEANUTS - Eyal Hareuveni

Tangle

This is a magical journey in sounds, ideas and textures, featuring three sonic visionaries. British John Butcher has developed his own profound method of playing the saxophones – soprano and tenor – as futuristic wind generators, employing a wide array of extended breathing techniques and producing feedback with nearby microphones. He converses in his own individual syntax, still, radiates a surprising playfulness and commanding elegance. Butcher collaborated before with American pianist Shipp and German analogue synthesizer
player Thomas Lehn, but it is the first documented meeting of Shipp and Lehn.

Shipp comes from free jazz but this free-improvised, free-associative meeting enables him to suggest bolder ideas and sounds, rarely heard in his own recordings. Lehn adds the mercurial element to this live performance, captured in Cafe Oto in London on February 2014, on the first night of Shipp three-day residency. Lehn highly inventive, often aggressive playing of the synthesizer introduces elements of danger and surprise and adds textual references to to psychedelia, sixties electronic experimentation via Stockhausen works.
Obviously, such a meeting may be considered as too experimental to the novice listener, but actually it is quite engaging, even in its many raw, manic and weird-sounding moments. The dynamics between these strong-minded musicians are immediate and organic, but their interplay also stresses their individual approaches. All three negotiate imaginative ideas, expressed in lightning speed and mesmerizing subtlety, playing with great focus to detail and structure, but at the same time busy exploring their own sound universes. This constant-complex play of touching and going charges and colors this meeting with tension and reserved drama.

There are few segments on «Cluster I” where the three sound as busy sketching a noisy swinging melody, but soon it morphs to a dense collision of sounds and then it settles as an atmospheric storm. Later on «Cluster II” Shipp sketches a lyrical soundscape, soon contrasted by Butcher attack and Lehn otherworldly noises. On

«Cluster III” Shipp repetitive chords dictate a hypnotic, playful pulse that reaches its climax with a beautiful solo of Butcher. The last “Tiefenshärfe” (Depth of field) is almost a ballad in the sonic terms of this trio, despite Shipp brutal hammering of the piano keys and Lehn resonating noises.
Run and check Tangle not only for the great music but also for the insightful liner notes of trumpeter Nate Wooley, the beautiful cover photo of guitarist Andy Moor and the beautiful inside painting of Gina Southgate, painted live at the Nickelsdorf Konfrontationen 2016.

POINT OF DEPARTURE - Jason Bivins

At Oto

For his duo with pianist Matthew Shipp, At Oto, Butcher opens with an incredible tenor saxophone discourse on "Curling/Charred." Initially, it sounds deceptively more linear and/or intervallic than on some of his other recent releases. But as he gets into it, he alternates aggressive, serrated phrases with near silent cooing and buzzing. The soprano solo that follows, "Mud/Hiss," is gorgeously contained and finds Butcher purposefully deploying squeaks and scratches for maximum effect: single notes whorl around until they create doppelgangers, two and three deep, before Butcher brings them back into a single laser-focus, ending with a cascade of laser notes.

Then Shipp is off with his solo, "Fundamental Field." It's a bright and punchy piece, with rolling phrases piling into each other rapidly, each one a fragment of some space-bop song you can't quite name. But what I've always dug so much about Shipp is how he lets every idea breathe, never content simply to bash you with information. After a huge cluster of sound in the middle of the piece, Shipp gets positively effusive with a sequence of pinwheeling chordal motion.

Finally, there is the thirty-minute duo "Generative Grammar," whose dark chamber shapes and modest preparations might initially fool blindfold test candidates into calling it a Schlippenbach/Parker piece. It opens with scalar, modulating, percussive movements, and brief tangles in the lower register. But what's more effective is the long, intense passage of ragged, pounding, insistent notes that scale back into a tense, suspended space. Harmonically fulsome and burring, Shipp refuses to lay off the gas for too long and this pushes Butcher into a simply howling phase (and it's quite rare to hear him do this these days). At times it's exhilarating, and it makes the more spacious passages that follow even more effective. Butcher's liquid and animal sounds that emerge from near silence are extremely engaging, but best of all is the intensely complex weave of high velocity lines that close out the piece.