This special afternoon performance at Cafe Oto, celebrating the launch of Evan Parker’s and Matthew Wright’s Transatlantic Trance Map recording, Marconi’s Drift, brought back together the British component of this momentous UK-US live collaboration which took place on 17 December 2022.
The original Transatlantic Trance Map event had seven musicians at the Hot Tin venue in Faversham and six at Roulette in Brooklyn, New York improvising together in real time using SonoBus open source software, expertly adapted by post-DJ performer Matt Wright, with whom saxophonist, Evan Parker, has been collaborating in electro-acoustic formats as Trance Map, since 2008.
Parker, for his part, was primarily responsible for creating the musical architecture of the performance : ‘I made a simple scheme for the concert which set out a sequence of combinations – mostly duos and trios, with the option to accompany and interject as impulse and the evolving context suggested.”
The sextet of eminent improvisors, reconstituted at Cafe Oto for the occasion, achieved a sensitive balance between the acoustic and electronic processing to create two sets of finely crafted soundscapes with a refreshing and intriguing flow to them. The liminal spaces that evolved took much of their shape from the computer-based input from either side of the stage with Wright, on the left, manipulating turntables, a Mac and an array of table-top equipment and Pat Thomas, on the right, deftly working with 2 phone screens and a controller, where exacting micro-sounds and peripheral electronic scribbles formed a cacoon within which the acoustic musicians interacted with telepathic invention.
Hannah Marshall, switching from bowing to fingerplay, drew out bass lines from her cello to blend with Thomas’s deep bass runs. Parker’s driving sax, going with the flow then understatedly guiding the ensemble, was well matched by Robert Jarvis’s powerful, fluid statements on trombone and those of Alex Ward on clarinets, never one to hold back when the vortex started to swirl.
The contrasts between wafer-thin, feathery sequences and urgent, intricately woven entanglements gave tactile character to the piece and confirmed the strength of the group’s focus. High pitched, electronic birdsong sat alongside low earth rumbles, recalling Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening. Parker’s elegant phrases skipped along the top of many structural layers prefacing shuddering, jumpy crescendos with Ward wailing, and Jarvis blasting, ultimately to wind down to silence, the audience respectfully holding back applause to savour the final moments of trance-like, musical transcendence.
Trance Map at Cafe Oto
Evan Parker: soprano saxophone
Matthew Wright: turntable, live sampling and processing
Robert Jarvis: trombone
Hannah Marshall: cello
Pat Thomas: live electronics
Alex Ward: clarinet
The original recording from 2022 also included trumpeter Peter Evans in Faversham, and in New York the group consisted of Sylvie Courvoisier (piano, keyboard), Mat Maneri (viola), Ikue Mori (laptop live electronics), Sam Pluta (laptop live electronics), Ned Rothenberg (clarinet, bass clarinet, shakuhachi), and Craig Taborn (piano, keyboard, live electronics)
