Tetragrammaton — Point of Convergence

First off - this is an excellent, wonderful album, from the highly acclaimed Utech  Records label, and one of the most intriguing and   carefully considered  explorations of the higher realms of experimental music that I   have heard in a  long time. Following on from their debut album Elegy For Native Tongues, from a few years ago, the three members of Tetragrammaton play and   integrate a variety  of more unusual instruments, from  waterphones and   crystal bowls, to gongs, hydrophones, hurdy-gurdy's  and frame drums, but   also the more familiar saxophone, rhodes piano and electric  guitar. They have produced a   near-perfect album which alternates between  subtle, playful reveries   such as the paradisaical  waterbowls and  tinkling bells of Portrait of  Turab (Parts 1 and 2) to  the discordant sax, drums and  percussion which swirl up to a resonant, epic  crescendo in the  invigorating  Disjecta Membra.

The eclectic patch-work  of influences and  impulses - free jazz, loop/drone, psychedelic rock, musique concrete and  traditional/ethnic  East Asian  music, to name but a few - can be  ascertained immediately,  but there is  no cheap plagiarism or shoddy,  half-hearted attempts at  pushing the  envelope here; just true  craftsmanship and talent, all  galvanised into a  rich, improvisatory,  multi-layered sound which  creates a  weird, haunting, delightful spectrum of  different dimensions on  each track.

There are melodies  and motifs  which  follow through and connect each piece, but some of them  are so   fabulously nebulous, fine and inchoate, that I would be hard-pressed  to   define which instruments created them. The vibrating drones and sounds   of the track Sol de Paula is a good example. It starts off quite   ambient   and tender, then gradually builds into a dark smorgasbord of  various free-flowing  instrumentation, which is - paradoxically - featherweight  and   airy, yet loaded and heavy; simultaneously  cacophonous and harmonious.  Similarly, Sylibin Therapy creates a  strange, mercurial  atmosphere which isn't easy to put  into  words - always  evidence of something amorphous, poetic and beautiful - utilising neurotic, scatter-shot, insect-like percussive elements conjoined with slightly bestial, hardly discernible, low-end vocals, insistent electric guitar and (what I take to be) the Japanese string instrument the Taisho-koto.

If you want name-checks in terms of influences,   then you  could say that John Zorn, Tony Conrad, Faust, Soft Machine, Sun Ra, Fushitsusha, Acid Mothers Temple, Taj Mahal Travellers and a   host  of traditional Japanese or East Asian musicians, which I wouldn't    necessarily know, are all here, somewhere, but these are only  seeds or parallels to the music - this is radical, refined and wholly    original 'free-improv-psych-drone', for want of a better term which could entirely encompass this unique art-piece.

Tetragrammaton create pure and unadulterated,  ingenious music - it is   miles ahead of some of the other so-called  'experimental' or 'out-there' drone or improv based music -   these musicians don't need to  show off with shallow, bombastic pyrotechnics  or  pop-softened,  emotionally manipulative atmospherics - they self-evidently have  authentic, vital artistry free-flowing through their   veins and this album is a towering and sublime sound-sculpture formed   from the life-blood of  their multifarious, prodigious energies and talent.