Tantric Doctors — Karesansui
The clarinet's' utterances are often quite melodic, rooted in the playing of discernable notes or scales. As the clarinet is paired with no other melodic voice, the effect still becomes quite fragmented, changing ideas whimsically or restlessly. There is a constant searching for novel figures, a sense that each successive 30 seconds is an entirely novel, unique moment, a glimpse into something that quickly departs before it can be understood. The visionary playing of Eric Dolphy comes to mind, a soul who always had a knack for creating 'out' music without simply striving for ugliness or illogic.
The electronic textures found on this album are generally foreign to the world of jazz, and even to the world of modern electronic music. This is a sound palette lifted directly from the worlds of 50-60's musique concrete and 80's industrial music. Irregular muted blips, tones, plucks and crumpled brown noise punctuate themselves through a heavy tape hiss. The high noise level is intrinsic to the machines that create these sounds, and so becomes an inevitable part of the music. This contrasts curiously with the utter dryness of the clarinet's raw acoustic tone. The absolutely chaotic nature of these early synthesizers, which were in fact not particularly well suited to the creation of conventional 12 tone music, fits wonderfully with free jazz.
Woolf's style of playing could be described as 'thinking aloud', without any caution or hesitance to the continuous toying with ideas. At many times, there is little clear relation between the instrument layers beyond that they both include interesting and listenable ideas and sounds. While it might seem logical that a free jazz album should possess some kind of evidence that the different voices are responding to one other, in this case it doesn't much particularly matter, as they are matched in spirit: in liveliness, and unwillingness to dwell on any figure for long. They simply exist at once without negatively interfering with one another.
This is a far cry from minimalist free jazz in which the performers stare fixedly on each other in near silence, waiting for the cue to break the suffocating emptiness. It's equally as far, curiously enough, from the anxiety inducing dissonance and cacophanous thrashing of free jazz's most violent iterations. It would seem the motivation is rather to explore the hallucinatory, evocative aspects of tone and rhythm, rather than the forcible exorcism of demons, and as such, Woolf is after my own heart. It is free jazz from a psychedelic worldview in which pleasure and emotion are not considered indulgences. Each moment seems to present a new "what if?".
An album of either pure clarinet or raw electronics from Woolf would have been animated and creative enough to engage my attention on its own. However, it is the unlikely combination of these timbres which give this album its uniqueness and sheer nerve. Pairing a melodic voice with a chaotic sound creation set up incapable of creating melodic tones or rhythmic structure is a ballsy move. It begs the question, what is the intersection between these two things? The answer, I think, is that both can be played with the same affect, even if the actual resulting sounds are not the same. This is one of my favorite free improvisation albums in recent memory