discernment by John Butcher / Dominic Lash / John Russell / Mark Sanders

A memory trick. Experiencing playback of a half-forgotten evening of live music, witnessed as a scene set in darkened space, spiked by a sustained projection of thought-in-train. There is a loose plasticity to this effect, one that demands cinematic form, as everything is faded up from blackness, silence, one spectre happening now, another having occurred then, forming a sequence that blends flashback with the intent presence of the moment. Always subject, behind the eyelids in the ever-dark skull, to loss, waking from the spell, coming to light. Duality of performance, set in real time when the world was open, unconcerned, another as a mode of listening months hence, closed up in quarantine. The dream effect is Doppler. First thoughts then upon waking then, Where am I? seemingly we reside in an industrialised form of nature, yes, hearing bells, hum of infrastructure, unidentified birds hooping over a sharp shoulder of an edifice long standing. Our duplex film begins slowly, in breathy exhalations, tight with thought, smatterings of labour, yes, echo-locating percussive dashes, fingers fiddling with small details, still able to coast the rising swells of broader sound. We’re waking up in a specific environ here, beyond the concert venue, extra to the recording, far from chill Dalston evening, faint rain, plastic lettering, the market place half cleared. Slowly the scenario comes into points, wooden surfaces pecked by metallic shards, tracing tree grains under the fingertips, tight coils of brass string over taut bellows, the sliding slip of an upper register softened with the beginnings of sweat. Sounds rustle upward, broken perceptions, keen, stretching tacit yet wry lubrication from deep sobriety. Rising seamlessly into intensifying violence, illicit bells outside the waking room, or the body adjusting to its own wakefulness, its hidden, un-mastered fluids, air pockets, pops and clicks, Wake! Wake! The body precedes you. Proceed with just these available senses, all forever entangled, as they begin to converse, and to sense their own environs, light beginning to feed itself, as if to ask, what is this gathering information, some kind of shared substance coming to form, a particular décor, detail, as we hear these musicians, as sets of circumstances, laugh, speak, point to something, lean into one another, bristle into opposing modes, yep, that gesture unhinged, that slice humble, then going into looser-mouthed slurps lurching as grotesque, leaps in and bounds. A particular arrangement of elements, already prompting a running commentary beyond this one, a singular phrase wedged into mud, or sand, a cold cymbal flush pricked by pinched fingers (of which you can hear the shape, clusters over a fret gap) picked up and planted elsewhere, rapidly excised, caught on, before coming to rest on a misty bed always already set beneath it. Wake! There a percussive hint of absent piano, the sound not stopping now, unable to come to rest here, now, no not on your life, this chase scene or something set on a dolly, pulling with and against the camera, cursor, crosshair, pinched eardrums, able to push off faraway in a leap, before pressing to a cumulative tone of wayward thought, not desire-less but without external object, a least for a moment, then sophisticated pseudo-sentimental, picked apart like fruit, peeling back to leave a tumbling guitar lamenting dryly, cupping its own voice off here and there, swilling a perception of the space, an amplified signal, architecture swamping a concord. Get the drama of this. A scorched earth sample, as a phrase sweeps like an Aloha! and a saxophone that ripples pure through a room segment, only for a frequency edge to be sheared off by an eraser tool tongue, impressing a harmonic wake, leaving an unavailing chord to hang, waiting for the consistency to be available for a WAIL, ripening aggression that is not anxious but joyous, reeling a Fragonard swing lozenged by Cézanne, a faint rotunda structure revolving, bass notes stepping down and around a tight whorl of inner sound, coordinates quickly drawn, distress marks, hooks for future returns, editing leaps. A mobile sequence, pitch dark forest, far beyond any Uccello-recession, thick with hidden trees that can be continually strung over a sound hole, every flicker of the needle thus responsive, an emanation that now invokes the cellular, whilst an overtone rises to the beams with a kettle whistle. We take in these shifting scenes as a cinematic bloom, forming, forming, as we would with an introduction to a world fully new, first-forming from unfamiliarity, Where am I? Wake! Wake! rose light seeping into a sleeping ear, seeming upright before slanting off into regularity, pooling flow. On a focus pull, a character suddenly separates from the celluloid, screen-less, sucking on a hissing mouthpiece. All this is being formed now, not quite in memory and not fixed as a recording. Not cinema either, but unfamiliar life, switching up, blowing, pulling, shared substance, soft forms billowing together under hard ceilings, lived and recalled in extracted moments of pressurised beauty, the tense rigging of harmonic structure manoeuvred bodily out of space – Up like smoke! – inside out too, switching registers as easy as the light, jump-cuts, renewed positions, forming the substance of the music itself.

- David Stent

Dominic Lash is an improviser, composer, double bassist, guitarist, and writer.

dominiclash.blogspot.co.uk