Colin Stetson - All This I Do for Glory

Drowned In Sound 100

It was around this time only last year that Colin Stetson released his extraordinary reworking of Henryk Góreck’s Symphony No. 3. That work was a huge undertaking, drawing as it did from a well-loved classical piece and the demands of working with a large number of different musicians. Roll forward just over 12 months, and Stetson is now set to release All This I Do for Glory, a very different, if no less impressive, project. He has reduced his musical palette to essentially just his saxophone, recorded with no overdubs or loops, and engineered and mixed the record himself. As much as his solitary approach to this work may have been a stripped down affair the result remains anything but, largely due to his alchemical ability to muster so much from so little.

The title track leads the charge on a record that commits to a breathless pace. The song’s grip is instantaneous, drawing you in as it does through a deep groove and off-kilter vocal. What begins as a woozily seductive introduction deepens into something much more haunting, its driving rhythm intact. More than ever before Stetson has achieved a synthesis between staggering technical ability and startlingly visceral music. Throughout the record the spell is never broken, it’s only in hindsight that you wonder how on earth he created this expansive sound with such a humble arsenal.



There are exceptions. 'Like Wolves on the Fold' begins with a sharp intake of breath, but within the first few moments of ferocious playing panic sets in because, Jesus Christ man, that’s nowhere near enough! Fear not though, Stetson’s circular breathing technique ensures he can sustain this wizardry over a prolonged period. And it effectively feeds into the drama of a piece that features violent claps that sound like horse’s hooves racing over hard ground. The urgency is ramped up as the track progresses to a histrionic level that is as thrilling as it is unnerving.

During the recording, a number of mics were attached to Stetson’s saxophone, and the level of detail they picked up adds real depth to the world he has created within this record. You can physically feel the dark rumbling bass notes of 'Between Water and Air'. The track warps time through stretched out notes and the return of the galloping steed that switches from a canter to sprint, building a suspense that is almost unbearable.

Amongst other things, Stetson has described this album as one that explores ambition, legacy, afterlife, and the beginning of a doomed love story in the style of Greek Tragedies. The luminous beauty of 'Spindrift' can possibly be attributed to the latter. Its feverish emotionality is overwhelming, its cell shifting rhythms utterly disarming. Here Stetson has created his most powerful piece yet and proved himself a conjurer of abstract yet nonetheless razor sharp narratives, which make the concluding fade almost too much to bear.

But don’t expect the following track to cushion the blow. 'In the Clinches' answers searing beauty with rampant brutalism. The richly detailed production is raw as hell, untethering a raging beast of destruction. And the pairing of these two tracks only serves to heighten their respective elegance and mercilessness on a record that is dizzyingly both muscular and tender.

God knows what you call this music, attempting to prescribe a genre seems like a fruitless diversion from something so freakishly sublime. Stetson has described this album as temporally somewhere between New History Warfare and his collaborative record with Sarah Neufeld, Never Were the Way She Was. And You can hear the confluence of the savage percussion of the 'Judges' and the roaring melodies present on 'The Sun Roars into View'. Across his discography thus far he has created some of the most exciting and innovative music of this century, and this record feels like an acutely focused summation of his work to date.

In spite of the title's suggestion, All This I Do For Glory is far from a vainglorious pursuit, rather a deeply sensitive one. Nevertheless, the byproduct of his achievements here will no doubt solidify his position as a towering musical force. Colin Stetson is matchless, his record glorious, and you’ll likely never experience silence as dramatically as the moment when All This I do for Glory concludes.

![104668](http://dis.resized.images.s3.amazonaws.com/540x310/104668.jpeg)

Mon Apr 24 07:25:56 GMT 2017

Tiny Mix Tapes 80

Colin Stetson
All This I Do For Glory

[52Hz; 2017]

Rating: 4/5

There are two main features of the music of Colin Stetson, evident on All This I Do For Glory, no more or less than in his previous output. On the one hand, he makes pieces that sound “song-like” without them actually being “songs.” Stetson has, after all, collaborated with Arcade Fire and Bon Iver, and there’s no doubt a whole “indie” sensibility informing his work. Then again, Stetson uses his circular breathing technique — which allows him to play continuous tones without interruption, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth by storing air in the cheeks — allows him to play pieces without a traditional “song” structure. His pieces feature one figure played over and over again until its possibilities are exhausted or Stetson exhausts himself.

On the other hand, it sounds “electronic-like” without being made with much in the way of electronic equipment (Stetson stipulates that it’s all done without the use of overdubs, loops, or much studio tinkering). Comparisons are sometimes deadly, but one point of reference might be William Basinski with a different point of emphasis on the degradation of sound. Basinski pieces are about the quasi-biological workings of obsolete pieces of technology. Stetson pieces, especially on All This I Do, seem to be more like what happens when human physical capacities (his lungs and lips) imitate machines. Stetson’s circular breathing technique reduces the body to a series of inputs and outputs in which the expression (which gives these pieces their song — or speechlikeness) comes from the human variations in his playing, the minor inconsistencies, the squealing, buzzing, or cooing sounds he emits like demonic eruptions.

All the tracks here (note that it would be crude to say they were indistinguishable from one another, but keeping your eyes on the tracklisting might be a good idea) sound like they could have been made with an arsenal of sequencers and rippling arpeggiators, but it’s all the sound of one man surfing the crests of a series of pulses. Everything here, with the exception of “Spindrift,” is backed up with a spare looping beat. The roaring punk blast of “In The Clinches” is the shortest thing here, the longest being the complex peaks and troughs of “The Lure of the Mine.”

Stetson claims that All This I Do For Glory is about “ambition, legacy, afterlife, and the beginning of a doomed love story in the style of Greek tragedies.” This is not the place to discuss whether he’s talking about his own ambitions, desires, or mortality. Equally, it’s impossible for him to make the tragic dimension of the work appear inside the work itself (he has to rely on discourses external to it to do that for him). Maybe he’s not doing himself justice here. Maybe it’s less like tragedy — a culture’s self-conscious representation of how the wound of the past bleeds into the uncertain present — and rather more primordial, more like an ecstatic mating ritual in which Stetson is both the luminously feathered bird of paradise and the dowdy vessel of future works. Let’s hope there’s plenty more in the tank.

Tue May 09 04:05:09 GMT 2017

Pitchfork 71

The music of experimental saxophonist Colin Stetson gives you an unusually heightened awareness that you are hearing a human body laboring to produce sound. That is human breath passing its way through a metal tube, yup; those are fingers clacking on different keys to manipulate tone and pitch. This hyper-awareness can feel like a distraction: If you’ve ever been deeply stoned in mixed company, focusing more on the moving mouth of your interlocutor than the emerging words, Stetson’s music might summon an uncomfortable déjà vu. But that palpable strain is in some ways the implicit subject of his art: Any interview or feature on Stetson eventually mentions his circular breathing technique, the Herculean way he keeps forcing air into the body of his saxophone to keep his music going. His album and song titles, too, often evoke struggle on an epic scale—New History Warfare, “Hunted” and “Brute” and “This Bed of Shattered Bone.”

His latest album is called All This I Do for Glory, and the six compositions on it survey the same blasted, rocky terrain. Stetson has his approach: You either know everything about him and the demanding way he makes his music going in, or you have your mind blown by it on first contact. His saxophone playing has reshaped people’s ideas of what the instrument can sound like, how it can be played, and how it can be used, and his trio of records, New History Warfare, is thus far his defining statement.

All This I Do for Glory, by contrast, doesn’t offer a single new idea during its runtime—it’s easy to get greedy with a fearless and inventive artist and hope they stay fearless and inventive forever. Glory instead settles into grooves and revisit territories. Stetson plies us with all his best techniques—his irradiated drones emerging from his bass saxophone are like Hans Zimmer film cues all by themselves, capable of shattering bedrock. He sings through the mouthpiece of his saxophone while blowing, producing a disembodied ghost vocalist crying an eerie melodic counterpoint to his own melody. The “thump” and “click” of percussion coming from the keypads slapping the body of his horn are so tactile it feels like he is drumming his fingers directly on the grooves of your brain.

He does all of this, in fact, in the first few minutes of the opening title track, which gives the album a strange “Stetson’s Greatest Hits” feeling. Even the dirge-like processional feels like a slight echo of something he’s played before. The differences here are in degrees—the whiplash percussive crack of “Like Wolves on the Fold” is one of the most violent sounds he’s ever made, and the track itself feels inexorable, even nightmarish, in its cacophony, like a village raid witnessed through a hole in the wall. “Between Water and Wind” is almost pure percussion, and the thumpa-thumpa-thumpa pulse of “In the Clinches” feels physically violent. These moments, when his music toes the line separating music from pure texture, are some of the most vivid.

But he's dug into all of these trenches before, and at times the forward march feels like a slog. There is a whiff of old-school machismo to what Stetson does—detectable in the steel-grey imagery of his titles, the muscular drive of his pieces, and, not least, the sight of his ropey arms wrangling sound from the hulking tank of an instrument he keeps strapped to his body. So when his sax flutters skyward on “Spindrift,” it is a relief. It is one of the only pieces that feels touched by warmth and sunlight, and its redemptive spirit breaks from the more serious stuff, a flower picked and studied before the slaughter resumes.

If you come away from Glory nursing suspicions that Stetson’s thrilling work might have grown a little one-note, try his reverent remake of Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony from last year, in which he enlisted a small ensemble including the violinist Sarah Neufeld and the virtuosic drummer Greg Fox to tackle the most fearsome territory of all: unabashed sentiment; or his muted full-length collaboration with Neufeld, Never Were the Way She Was, from 2015. Both of those albums bring Stetson’s well-developed ideas into thrilling contact with newer, unfamiliar ones. The repetitive throb of minimalist music is exceptionally good at taking the shape of whatever it comes into contact with. Maybe this is why he’s more inspired when he strays away from his intensely individualist solo albums—each an imposing continent of hands and breath—and instead soaks up energies with others.

Tue May 02 05:00:00 GMT 2017

The Free Jazz Collective 60

By Daniel Böker
First there is a beat. A beat built by Colin Stetson's Sax. Colin Stetson on the way to the club? Yes and no. Of course, maybe like Oren Ambarchi said Hubris was his way to the club (at least that's what I read).

To prepare myself for this review I read the last one that was published on a Stetson album, which was written by Paolo Casertano on part three of his New History Warfare. Paolo's last sentence stuck with me,  he wrote that he had hoped for something new on the next record. So here we are with All This I Do For Glory and the question is, is there something new to discover?

First of all, you would recognize Colin Stetson on this album without knowing the name on the cover,  his way of playing his patterns throughout the album is recognizable, and so I think the 'new thing' is the beat you hear in the beginning.

The first track 'All This I Do For Glory" starts with a strange beat, to slow to dance to. Colin Stetson's music is kind of hypnotizing. And the 'beat' on the first track does quite a good job in that respect. Over the beat he plays his sax-patterns, reminding you of minimalist music. There is already a lot to read about the way he treats his instrument to produce the sounds you hear, so I won't repeat it here. I get lost in it every time I hear it, and the first track is a very good example of it, especially if you haven't heard his music before.

The second track "Like Wolves on the Fold" also starts with sounds that build a strong beat, but in this one the singing sounds seem to be stronger (I think I can hear him breath.) The track has an urgency to it, and the beat doesn't find its way to the dance floor again.

The third track "Between Water and Wind" intensifies the urgency. The sound gets a bit darker but in the end I stick to my original musical observation: This time it's all about the beat.

I could take you through all six tracks, but I still come to the same conclusion that this is the difference, the new thing.

So what does it mean to me, the listener?

I am glad that things change. I like it to recognize an artist by his sound, his way of composing and still realize that he tries to develop new approaches, so I appreciate this step that Stetson takes on this album. While I write this paragraph I am listening to New History Warfare part 3 to compare the two once more. I am immediately captured by the energy and the urgency of the music.

All This I Do For Glory is a catchy album and I like it, but I miss the ruthless sound of the older albums including his collaboration with Sarah Neufeld. It seems as if this new album was an effort to sound a little bit more catchy than before and still be recognizable. So Paolo, he's changed.


All This I Do For Glory by Colin Stetson




Tue Jul 25 04:00:00 GMT 2017