Todd McComb: Archon

Description

Todd McComb's Jazz Thoughts

31 January 2023

Subject

I had no idea it was coming, pace prior remarks, but Works for violin, percussion, and machine learning environment — new on Neos Music (last noted here in a February 2019 review of Ars Nova / New Music...) — also addresses the violin & percussion combo, but with electronics as well. In fact, the "machine learning environment" is the main feature of this album (recorded in Ghent in June 2022), a system called "Archon" — that also provides digital photo renderings of its prospective self, plus liner notes involving "Archon trying to describe what Archon is." The Archon system (based in part on SuperCollider, as per Anthony Braxton's AI work) was developed by Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso, the latter of whom also plays violin here (to be sampled & manipulated — joined on the second of two tracks by Christian Smith on percussion to form a "trio"), yielding remarkably sophisticated music: I've felt compelled to write this discussion in large part because the result not only reflects current (extended...) practice in free improvisation, but generally surpasses it in terms of intricacy — in terms of delicate intricacy, that is, quasi-mycelial relations spreading in gossamer threads across the musical tapestry.... There's thus little stable sense of individual line, but rather various diffuse divergences & recombinations, twisty as fog — yet not yielding a smooth texture, instead with variations in attack, projecting a general sense of percussiveness as well.... (And there's really no more of the latter on the second track, which is both shorter & perhaps less rich overall....) But there's also a sense of voice, or of finding a voice (pace the bio, etc.): The various (usually multiple) croaking or growling or chirping recalls various (zoomimetic) quasi-vocalization techniques elsewhere, indeed such that the basic "musical stuff" of Works for violin, percussion, and machine learning environment recalls e.g. Ekphrastic Discourse (as just reviewed here last month...): The subtle timbral variety thus suggests a larger ensemble, but also a do-it-yourself vibe... even feeling almost rural here at times? The "DIY" theme seems to resonate in the photos as well, and these can be rather creepy, even macabre: Archon seems to view itself as a hybrid between the living & the non-living, invoking even a sense of death... i.e. dead bird parts (butchered no less...), as it appears to "think" of itself as a sort of mechanical bird, a songbird one supposes.... There's thus a strong sense of naturalistic-industrial hybridity here (again, not unlike what e.g. Sandy Ewen cultivates with her "found objects" work...), and even a parallel sense of spatial (architectural) investigation via shifting resonances, etc. That involves (specifically) spectral relationality as well, i.e. proliferation of interval relations beyond twelve-tone equal temperament (as also on Ekphrastic Discourse, there even "rigorously" per James Ilgenfritz).... The sound per se then, its figurations & relations, is not wholly different from some other contemporary improv, but as noted, moves more fluidly & intricately, although not in a heavy way... its overall density indeed being typical enough, even tending toward filigree.... Works for violin, percussion, and machine learning environment thus challenges what I call "segmentation" quite broadly, both in terms of the hybridity of its "participants" — & that extends from the industrial-mechanical into the zoomimetic... — & in its approach to sound, i.e. as ramified far beyond the traditionally discrete musical "note." (So it's e.g. basically — although presumably not technically... — impossible to "count" the musical lines here.... One might note as well that Archon isn't just finding a "voice," but seems "intentionally" to retain a non-unitary identity.) In short, if the album had appeared from human performers, I'd've been impressed by its (very contemporary) technique (especially its rhizomatic sense of line...). And it's not incoherent either, but does lack a register of affective coherence, such that I end up more "impressed" than transformed myself. The delicate intricacy also leaves each instant composition feeling rather long, so probably best to hear one at a sitting....