HIIT - For Beauty Is Nothing But The Beginning Of Terror

A Closer Listen

Improvising is fun. Or at least, many career musicians eventually grow to prefer the relative freedom that improvisation allows, the focus on sound rather than technique and on creativity rather than the execution of a predetermined pattern. Classical musicians are particularly susceptible to this shift in perspective: after years of preparing the rigorous presentations of historical music that are classical music’s lifeblood, entering the world of improvisation can feel like discovering music all over again.

On the other hand, jazz and its offshoots have always welcomed improvisation as an integral part of their musical practice. As a result, much improvised music being made today takes place with free jazz hovering over its head, a more-or-less acknowledged elephant in the room that has become all-the-more difficult to ignore now that jazz has entered the conservatory. These two streams — free jazz and “post-classical” music — blur together in the contemporary improvised landscape, finding common ground in a history of experimentation and a penchant for the heady, intellectual new thing.

HIIT‘s For Beauty Is Nothing But The Beginning Of Terror embodies the contradictions inherent in improvisation within both of these idioms. The record is a standoff between musical freedom and aesthetic intellectualism, between raw energy and esoteric reserve, between drawing from the past and making the future. It attempts to walk a compelling line between the pointillism and machine-like insistence of mid-twentieth-century serialism and the angular fire of mid-career Coltrane, with mixed results. Aiming at the highest good of contemporary improv — unfamiliar sounds — HIIT occasionally finds their mark: which instrument — double bass, percussion, or piano — is coming up with the screaming, high-pitched droning at the beginning of “Gliss Glass”? How are the spooky, inside-the-piano tremolos being produced on “Perline”? Still, there is more to music than novel timbres and the outward trappings of historical avant-gardes. An interesting idea still needs a compelling form.

This is not to say the record has no highlights: the aforementioned “Gliss Glass” opens like something out of a Xenakis chamber work and drives forward like a perpetual motion machine, with insistent tremolos projecting energy, clarity, and focus. Soon to follow is “Concetto Spaziale (to Lucio Fontana)”, a satisfyingly sparse web of creaking cymbals, bass harmonics, and wandering strings of piano. The minimal, repeated bass plunks, woodpecker-esque interjections of percussion, and buried tension of “The Tartar Steppe (to Dino Buzzati)” do well to honor the quiet existential angst of its eponymous novel.

Yet many tracks seem to fall flat on either side of this jazz/classical divide. “Urbe”, for instance, smacks of run-of-the-mill, semi-aggressive free jazz sprinkled with dramatic pauses. The following track, “Urge (to Robert Masotti)” sounds like a faux-mysterious attempt at putting excerpts from Alban Berg to a free-form drum track, complete with the kind of melodramatic and strained double bass melody that also finds its way onto “Perline” and “Ecotone”. Time and time again, HIIT sets a few musical ideas in motion and lets them spin for awhile, but the ideas themselves often lack staying power or a life of their own.

For Beauty Is Nothing But The Beginning Of Terror makes clear that what shocked and intrigued in the past may become lifeless in the present. In a musical landscape over-saturated with the memory of its past avant-gardes, simply improvising in freer contexts may not always be enough to escape recycling the styles of our fore-bearers, even if we recombine them in ostensibly new ways. A reminder, then, that not all musical experiments succeed.  (Peter Tracy)