Fireflies by Gaudenz Badrutt, Ilia Belorukov, Wade Matthews

originally released as digital on scatter records (UK)
https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/fireflies

Grasping what is happening in a concert of freely improvised music requires multifocal listening. Specifically, it requires an awareness of how the individual improvisers are interacting, what each is contributing to the overall music, and how that overall music actually sounds as a clearly synergetic event.

Of course, when the musicians are playing electroacoustic devices, it can be quite difficult to determine who is playing what. Such devices are enormously varied, but very few of them call for the sort of expansive gestures required to play much more familiar acoustic instruments such as the drums or a cello, which any real musical listener can easily tell apart. Far fewer listeners will be able to draw the same distinctions between, say, a digital synthesizer, an analogue modular setup, or a laptop-controlled combination of digital synthesis and concrète-style manipulation of samples. Seeing these instruments on stage often fails to clarify matters, as the clearly visible gestures of a drummer or a cellist are almost entirely absent at a purely electroacoustic concert. And, of course, if one is not at the concert, and can only listen to a recording, it can very quickly become impossible to determine whether a series of sounds is a phrase being played by one musician or a rapid interaction among two or more. In such a case, how are we to grasp the interaction that makes freely improved music so dynamic and often so interesting? The answer lies in learning to grasp how the sounds themselves interact, which can only be learned by listening to music that really works, music in which the sounds actually do interact in meaningful ways. In other words, music that initially offers us more than we can grasp on just one hearing, yet offers us enough, on that initial hearing, to convince us that there is, in fact, more to be heard. Music that invites us to listen again, and again.

The present recording is of a first encounter. Ilia Belorukov and Gaudenz Badrutt have been playing together as a duo for some time. Musically, they know each other well. Neither, however, had previously played with Wade Matthews, so there was much to be discovered, and that, I believe, adds a certain freshness to the music they made together. Of course this is not an infallible formula. The mere fact of its being the first time could just as easily have produced a mild disaster, a mere hodgepodge of sounds that go nowhere. Happily, this encounter in CRUCE, Madrid’s premier space for improvised music, was truly fecund—so much so, in fact, that all three of us are pleased to share it with any and all interested listeners.

Wade Matthews

musician, label owner, concert organizer, sound engineer, writer

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