2022 is already going strong, but I wanted to look back at my personal highlight of 2021: the Ghost Trance Septet concert at Rainy Days festival. A truly wonderful evening in Luxemburg, with my septet playing Braxton’s composition 255 (with Elisa Medinilla, Frederik Sakham, Winnie Huang, Steven Delannoye, Teun Verbruggen and Niels Van Heertum), followed by a set of Anthony Braxton’s own Diamond Curtain Wall trio (with Suzanna Santos Silva on trumpet and Adam Matlock on accordion). Thanks again to Lydia Rilling for making this possible!
Ghost Trance Solos at Festival Riverrun in Toulouse
On september 30th I had the pleasure to give a lecture on my work not he music of Anthony Braxton as well as perform a set of Ghost Trance Solos. Thanks again to the whole team of GMEA-Albi for making this possible!
Ghost Trance Septet in the studio!
Last week I got the wonderful Ghost Trance Septet together again at Werkplaats Walter in Brussels to record a wide array of Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music! Diving deep into this music with such a group of players, each showing great dedication, openness and curiosity to explore Braxton's vast and beautifully complex musical universe is an incredibly rewarding experience. Thanks also to Nicolas Rombouts for the very skilful recording and general positive vibes during this intense recording process!
To lift the veil on what will be on the album, we recorded:
Composition 193 (1st species GTM)
Composition 255 (2nd species GTM)
Composition 264 (3rd species GTM)
Composition 358 (accelerator whip GTM)
The album will be released as a double LP on El Negocito Records, more details on the release will follow.
Ghost Trance Septet is:
Kobe Van Cauwenberghe, guitars, synth
Teun Verbruggen, drums
Frederik Sakham, double bass, e-bass
Anna Jalving, violin
Elisa Medinilla, piano
Niels Van Heertum, euphonium, trumpet
Steven Delannoye, tenor sax, bass clarinet
Zwerm - Great Expectations
Zwerm’s latest album “Great Expectations” is out!! Read/watch/listen more about it below, or get your own copy (vinyl, CD or digital) here!
The route that Zwerm has taken is often defined by the question “What if... ?” - like a dart thrown at a musical map, not quite blindly, but naive enough to lead to unexpected endings.
“What if we play Renaissance pieces written by John Dowland, but instead of playing lutes we play these tunes with a Telecaster – and then jam it through effect pedals and an amplifier?”
“What if we connect one hundred guitar pedals and just leave our guitars at home?” In 2020 our metaphorical dart landed on “What if we tried micro-tonality?”.
On the continents where Western musical theory is less stringently applied, micro-tonality is the rule, and has become the subject of many deep and thoughtfully written theories.
However for Zwerm, this phenomenon occurs in many, often surprisingly lighthearted forms. A dilapidated piano that has settled into a beautiful micro-tonal tuning of its own accord, enthusiastic choral
singing, a guitar whose three strings are tuned a quarter-tone higher, a saz (Turkish quarter-tone lute), a maddening guitar pedal, ...
“And... what if we work with a drummer?” Enter Karen Willems - dummer, extraordinaire, and ardent player in groups, projects and collaborations galore. One chance meeting and the deal was done. It was obvious before the start that Willems was the versatile and creative percussionist-in-a-toy-store necessary for this project. At the reins behind the scenes was producer Rudy Trouvé. Completing the team were Mark Dedecker (recording) and Joris Calluwaerts (mixing).
The results are in and it’s called ‘ Great Expectations’ – a title that, in several ways, fits perfectly with these strange 2021 times. ‘Great Expectations’ goes wide! Zwerm is at its best when it can run along the
borders between style and across traditions that otherwise would not necessarily intersect. The most straightforward rockers have a proggy tinge while the dreamy psychedelic songs lean more toward Richard Youngs. ‘Heavy Machinery’ sits neatly somewhere between Captain Beefheart and Richard Wagner, and ‘On My Way To Aguno’, set to an Iranian folk song chord progression, grew into a hyper personal lullaby. Zwerm used the saz and the sinter (Moroccan gnawa bass instrument) without falling into pastiche psychedelia, but you can still sense the orient.
link to album lyrics:
www.zwerm.be/lyrics-great-expectations.html
text: Stijn Buyst (shortened version)
translation: Thomas Moore
Video by Rudy Trouvé
credits
released April 1, 2021
all music written & played by Zwerm (Johannes Westendorp, Bruno Nelissen, Kobe Van Cauwenberghe & Toon Callier) & Karen Willems and arranged by Zwerm, Karen Willems & Rudy Trouvé
all lyrics by Bruno Nelissen, except No Questions No Lies, lyrics by Charles Dickens
produced by Rudy Trouvé
recorded on tape by Mark Dedecker at Studio Finster, Antwerp, november 2020
mixed by Joris Caluwaerts
artwork by Rudy Trouvé
lay out by Thomas Noppe
mastered by Uwe Teichert
NEWS DISTRIBUTION
with the support of the Flemish Government and Sabam
in coproduction with STUK - Huis voor Dans, Beeld & Geluid and deSingel
thanks to Cohort & Werkplaats Walter
copyright Time Goes By 2021
license
all rights reserved
Video: Benjamin Verdonck
"A Ritual of Openness. The (meta-) Reality of Anthony Braxton's Ghost Trance Music" and other recent publications.
Besides the release of my album “Gost Trance Solos” from november last year, some other publications appeared over the past few months on my ongoing research on the music of Anthony Braxton. This time in written form!
First and foremost I’m incredibly happy to share my first published academic article “A Ritual of Openness. The (meta-)Reality of Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music.”, which appeared in the latest edition of Forum + magazine. This article zooms in on the Ghost Trance Music compositions by the American composer Anthony Braxton. Simultaneously, it gives a broader perspective on Braxton’s oeuvre as a whole, as well as offering critical observations on the canon of post-war western art music. Read the full article here!
In december last year, the German magazine Neue Zeitung fur Musik published an interview I did for the Rainy Days Festival in Luxemburg, where I was scheduled to play Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music with my septet in November. The concert had to be rescheduled to the next edition due to the pandemic (new date: november 13 2021, mark your calendar! :) ), but I’m very happy to share this interview! Very nice to see Braxton’s work being featured in this magazine <3 Download the original publication (in German) here OR an english rendition here !
In February I had the opportunity to present a first try-out of a new version of Anthony Braxton’s visionary work “Echo Echo Mirror House Music” in collaboration with Carl Testa from Tri-Centric Foundation. We managed to do a first transatlantic live performance, where Carl was controlling the EEMHM sound collage and electronics from his home in New Haven, through a server in Amsterdam and then engaging the live musicians in Antwerp. The performance, which was part of the Articulate Research Days of the Antwerp Conservatory, received a wonderful review in the New Haven Independent. Carl and I also wrote down some reflections on working on this rarely performed work by Anthony Braxton and its possibilities for future development. You can read this text on the Tri-Centric Website!