Drowned In Sound 100

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.

Tiny Mix Tapes 80

Colin Stetson
All This I Do For Glory

[52Hz; 2017]

Rating: 4/5

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.

The Free Jazz Collective 60