The Wøøøh - Music For Weddings And Funerals
The Free Jazz Collective
80
By Stef
Three Danish musicians, Lars Bech Pilgaard on guitar, Henrik Pultz Melbye on tenor sax and clarinet, and Rune Lohse on drums, meet French bassist Sylvain Didou for this formidable piece of music. One long improvisation is stretched over two tracks ("Wedding" and "Funeral"), and the listener is treated to a haunting mixture of drone, noise and jazz.
On "Wedding", the four musicians create one gigantic wall of sound, that moves forward relentlessly, barely shifting in colour and harmonics, mesmerising and trance-inducing, frightening and horrifying. Pultz Melbye's sax keeps repeating the same phrases frantically, madly over the violence of bass and drums and deafening guitar sounds, and then, near the end, without relinquishing the piece's core idea, they deliver the same but now in a quiet mode of agonising sensitivity, with the struggling sax taking the lead role.
On "Funeral", the rhythm and approach are deliberately hesitant, raw and pumping, chaotic in its intent, yet somehow things coalesce into a crazy blend of harsh distress, until after four minutes a simple sax vamp creates a single anchor point for the three other instruments to move in the same direction, picking up energy by the collaborative effort, power and violence, and before you know it, the funeral has turned into an absolute nightmare. Things quiet down again, luckily, and a repetitive electronic pulse is the only continuity in freely improvised sonic emotions. Anything can happen and it does as you enter a world of eery, disturbing and disorienting sounds, full of agony and darkness (it is a funeral after all (but then the wedding did not sound like a wedding either)), first like free improvisation, then again shifting patterns start to emerge, built around a repeated deep note on the sax, and despite the vague structure, the music remains ephemeral and never turns solid.
This is daring music, and an incredible listening experience. A kick in the teeth.
Listen and download from Bandcamp ... and definitely watch the video!
Sun May 19 04:00:00 GMT 2019