{"id":9898,"date":"2024-12-16T13:09:32","date_gmt":"2024-12-16T19:09:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/postgenre.org\/staging\/4567\/?p=9898"},"modified":"2024-12-16T13:19:31","modified_gmt":"2024-12-16T19:19:31","slug":"going-beyond-parker-wright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/postgenre.org\/staging\/4567\/going-beyond-parker-wright\/","title":{"rendered":"Going Beyond What We Know: A Conversation with Evan Parker and Matt Wright on Trance Map"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the late 1850s, two decades before Thomas Edison\u2019s phonograph, French inventor \u00c9douard-L\u00e9on 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\u2019s 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 \u201cthe atmosphere of musical activity – the musical environment created by the performance.\u201d It is within this backdrop that Trance Map, the collaboration between Matt Wright and Evan Parker, and its latest offering, Horizons Held Close<\/em> (Relative Pitch, 2024), is particularly fascinating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> returns to Trance Map’s origins, with only the core duo presented. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em>. 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.  <\/p>\n\n\n