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In the late 1850s, two decades before Thomas Edison’s phonograph, French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville created the first sound recording device. In the generations since, the interrelation between recorded sound and new creation have continually been a matter of great controversy. When recorded music first emerged, many musicians became dismayed that it would end live performances and increasingly hamper their artistry. Jumping ahead decades, there were significant disagreements in some circles over whether sampling another’s work and reconfiguring it into different contexts was an act of creation at all. Even in avant-garde music, where musical adventurism reigns supreme, the use of recorded medium for expression has not been without its detractors. For one, creative heavyweight Derek Bailey, saw the  recorded media as conflicting with improvisation because a recording lacked “the atmosphere of musical activity – the musical environment created by the performance.” It is within this backdrop that Trance Map, the collaboration between Matt Wright and Evan Parker, and its latest offering, Horizons Held Close (Relative Pitch, 2024), is particularly fascinating.

Since forming in 2008, incarnations of Trance Map have expanded and morphed, changing in size and scope. In recent years, the project even crossed continents with simultaneous live performances in London and New York City by two different subsects. While the varied versions of Trance Map have each added something new, the ensemble’s heart has always lied in its initial duo of Wright and Parker and the dialogues they create with one another, conversations that transcend concepts of live creation and prerecorded material. Horizons returns to Trance Map’s origins, with only the core duo presented.

But that does not mean it is without several inputs. Sound designer Wright samples somewhat traditional material like field recordings, cassettes, and turntable scratches, to which the legendary saxophonist responds. However, the most inspired moments occur when Parker interacts with his own previously recorded saxophone lines. An artist musically communicating with themselves is conceptually intriguing.

Parker – a central figure of European free jazz who has long been at the forefront of electroacoustic experimentation – is no stranger to playing by himself. One could even argue he is best known for his solo soprano works using “pseudo-polyphony” through which he creates an illusion of polyphony through multiphonics, circular breathing, split tonguing, and polyrhythmic fingerings. Essentially, he has spent decades finding ways to – acoustically – make his horn sound larger than it is. But there is a vast difference between interacting with silence in that way and responding to prior exclamations of your own.

As to the latter, however, is that even what Parker is doing here? In controlling the prerecorded material, it is inescapable that Wright – gifted at creating sonic terrain – will interject some of his own thoughts into the process. So, who is Parker conversing with, himself? Wright? Both? Neither? Does it even matter? The intermixing of Wright’s use of Parker’s recordings with the saxophonist’s new creations raises many theoretical questions across the two long-form pieces that make up Horizons. The artists do little to resolve them, instead granting listeners the freedom to explore their own way through the disorientingly compelling landscape – both sonic and theoretical – laid before them, leaving many surprises to find along the way.  

PostGenre: Where does the title Horizons Held Close come from?

Matt Wright: I came up with the title, but there’s nothing particularly clever, hidden, or referential about it. It relates to my time in the Gobi desert of Mongolia in 2009, where I experienced the sensation of extreme distance but also total clarity of the horizon. With Trance Map, I’m interested in the sound feeling a long way away but also close to the ears, as if you are hearing a close performance in the desert or as if you are listening both to the present and a memory. The names of the tracks are locations in the Gobi where dinosaur bones have been found. I’ve been to a few of those locations – empty and very resonant spaces.

PG: The record is the first time since 2011 that the two of you released an album together without other artists joining you. What was behind the decision to go back to duo form?

MW: Evan mentioned it in passing when we were mixing Etching the Ether (Intakt, 2023), and I jumped at the chance! 

Evan Parker: Matt came to this with a very clear sense of purpose.  He was in charge of the setup, timings, and – I believe – conception too.  It was so clear that I was just carried along. I remember the feeling of reaching the end – a clear sense of completion.  The first record was a much more laborious process where we were discovering what the basis for interaction was. The intervening years have taken us to a much clearer sense of our identity, and a very clear line for future development.

PG: You have collaborated a lot in those years since 2011. How do you feel how you communicate has changed the most during that period?

MW: I have learned so much by sitting with Evan and mixing our recordings that we have made with collaborators. So much of how he hears music is in the way those recordings have been mixed. Essentially, it’s about listening not to the most obvious things, something at the edge of the sound or buried in the middle. Something that will become significant as the music emerges over time. After many years of doing those mixes, I started to politely make some mix decisions myself based on what I’ve learned from Evan. Now, when we play, it’s possible to hear the whole band (whether as a duo or a large group) in so much more detail than I could before. I think the live duo is more dynamic and flexible now because of those experiences of mixing the records. 

EP: There is a very clear understanding between us. In concert situations, I may arrive at decisions regarding setup, monitor levels, and use my seniority to get my own way. But Matt has a very effective way of exposing erroneous prejudices on my part.  It is finally quite a collective decision-making process.

PG: Matt, what is your process for selecting the samples for the project?

MW: Well, the vast majority of the samples are captured live in the moment of playing. So, the process is simply to listen to what is being played live, record some of it, play that back against what is being played live, and listen to what can be made of that dialogue, all whilst mixing whatever is also happening at the time. In ensembles, I usually take a separate feed of everything, so I have lots of incoming options, but the process of selection has to be spontaneous. It has to be based on what the music is doing at one point in time. In the duo, I have options to work with many layers of live sampling. I think there are moments in the second track on the album where there are around ten layers of live sampling. 

PG: Your project Locked Hybrids used samples of Evan’s performances as well. How do you feel – if at all – that working with his music as raw material on that project shaped the music you made when you got back together?

MW: That project came out of lockdown. In a sense, the first Trance Map record was exactly the same idea: to take samples of Evan and construct a work in the studio. It just so happened that we were able to do this studio process live that we were able to perform as Trance Map. When lockdown came, I had fragments of a studio recording made with Evan, Mark Nauseef, and Toma Gouband, but I made music that leaned a little closer to electronic music. To be honest, I’m not sure my approach in Trance Map changed that much when we got back on the road, just that I was grateful to get back there! 

PG: To some, there does seem to be a fairly clear divide between using recorded material and creating live. As one example, Derek Bailey saw archiving via audio recording as opposing the spirit of improvised music as it causes some elements of live creation to be lost. However, Trance Map blurs any such lines. Do you find Derek’s perspective completely misguided, and how do you ensure the elements he references are not lost in your work? 

MW: I still respect the idea that an acoustic performance has its own special magic that can’t be captured in a recording. If you do record it, it becomes a different experience. Ultimately, it’s all about what you then do with that recording, and what happens if you then improvise with it. This is a question that is at least as old as audio recording itself. The term I use is ‘navigable archive’ in the sense that a recording is no longer a fixed thing and can be accessed from multiple entry points. We covered that in an online article here. 

EP: Thankfully, Derek made a hell of a lot of records despite his theoretical objections!  In working with him for a good while, both in groups and as a duo, it was clear to me that he took recording just as seriously as he did his solo playing, which was often sublime.  The way Matt uses technology has blurred all the old distinctions between playing and recording.  Live sampling is just the entry point for what Matt does in concert.  I have come to think of it as playing a multi-track studio live.

PG: Evan, you have done a lot of work in electroacoustic music. How do you feel your approach to music in that area changed the most over time?

EP: I started in the analog age and still enjoy a good clean sine wave. If a player has built an instrument and has learned to play it, I don’t mind whether it’s a wood block or a computer if the excitement of making music is audible. 

PG: Evan has indicated elsewhere that he does not see terms like improvisation as useful. Do you both see that term as belittling what you do when composing in the moment?

MW: I have no problem with improvisation as a term. But I suppose it is about people’s expectations. If you mean that improvisation is a completely blank slate, then it is very difficult to try to play that way after fifteen years as a duo or – I guess – for Evan to play like that after a lifetime of playing. With Trance Map, I don’t think we try to pretend we have just met, though. The whole ‘blank slate’ approach is helpful if it is catalytic and if it can bring new ideas to the music. But if it is an approach only for ideologies’ sake, then like most ideologies, they have their limits in the practical world. 

EP: I do not recognize this as anything I have ever said.  Improvisation is the central truth, the raison d’etre for me. I think a book could be written to clarify my position.    

PG: Actually, you even use improvisation as a primary means of compositional practice. Matt, do you follow a similar approach?

MW: In my case, I studied ‘composition,’ and have a long-running relationship with Ensemble Klang in The Hague and my own ensemble, Spheric Totemic in the UK. I studied all kinds of music, from ancient to contemporary, from around the globe, fully notated and ‘complex’ pieces to graphic scores, film music, sonic art, installations, pop music, post-minimalism, hip hop, etc. So, I’ve always been ok with structuring time using improvised materials, notations, word scores, graphics, video, and all kinds of other materials in my own work, depending on the ensemble. Working with technology sort of negates all of that anyway, because the whole improvised/notated/composed thing is partly about paper, and we’re getting beyond paper. OK, it’s about a lot more than just paper, but you get my point! 

PG: As you have continued to work together over the years, do you feel your increased familiarity with each other’s artistic expressions removes some of the surprise of your collaborations?

MW: I’m more surprised now than ever before because Evan has a tradition of searching, so he is always finding something new. As a duo, we might have a recognizable sound, perhaps. But it’s in the details where the new music is emerging. Evan is much more progressive than me in that musical searching, I think, going beyond what we know.       

EP: Co-evolution starts to happen in groups or combinations of players that play together regularly.  Understandings and intuitive anticipations develop. I am not of the “once” school.

‘Horizons Held Close’ is out now on Relative Pitch Records. You can purchase it on Bandcamp. More information on Matthew Wright is available on his website. You can learn more about Evan Parker on his site.

Photo credit: Katherine Mager