MYL Trio

Casserley/Floridis/Rodrigues/Sjöström
Fields
Creative Sources CS 811 CD

Known as a composer, academic and proponent of electro-acoustic music, the UK’s Lawrence Casserley has increasingly involved his signal-processing expertise in live improvisations, most notably with Evan Parker. Extending his programming expertise further, Casserley’s recent projects, including these incisive example, have him interacting with an ever-widening group of like-minded players.

A live concert with new and familiar associates, the field workers on Fields, besides the signal processing controller, are Greek clarinetist Floris Floridis, Finnish saxophonist Harri Sjöström and Portuguese cellist Guilherme Rodrigues. A touring trio at one point the Parallel Universes which converge on its eponymous disc are those of Casserley, Austrian violinist Mia Zabelka and Japanese pianist Yoko Miura.

Consisting of one extended and one briefer improvisation, the quartet session integrates and highlights the signal-processing instrument’s whistling oscillations, static drones and programmed textural washes alongside reed peeps and beeps plus arco buzzes and pizzicato pulsations from the cellist. Although some timbres may be elliptical, the pieces’ logical development occurs when programmed metallic shakes add percussive ballast to the polyphonic exposition. As it widens, Floridis and Sjöström individually or with elevated call-and-response vamps unfold every manner of reed innovations. These include slippery scoops and gritty chalumeau bass clarinet emphasis as well as tongue slaps, muted hunting-horn suggestions and circular breathed trills. Rodrigues’ col legno slaps occasionally enliven the narrative. Yet the straight and speculative parameters of the program come most clearly into aural focus when during different sequences signal processing transforms into bell-ringing audacity and those times when the cellist introduces brief near melodic interludes.

Both more and less acoustic, the MYL Trio disc’s only wind affiliations come from those few instances when Miura’s melodica puffs intersect with electronic burbles. Zabelka also studs the final encore with vocalized cackles, mumbles and yowls in straited contrast to the swinging motifs the pianist creates following her shift from repeated keyboard plinks and slides. As early as “Conflux in Göteborg”, the first track, chiming echoes and squeaky ripples from the signal processing and the violinist’s subsequent turn from harmony to ascending spiccato stops projects a horizontal direction as the pianist turns from single note comping to more animated intricate keyboard variations with internal echoes on one hand and pressurized cascades on the other. Throughout, the trio tries out varied strategies, often in broken-chord evolution, with the violinist’s encompassing sul tasto rubs and  doubled stops and slides; the pianist vibrating implements on top of her instrument’s inner string set, as methodical chording is sometimes interrupted by multiple feints, passes and stops; and the signal processing instrument’s textures wiggling and flanging.

“Strata in Stockholm” is an extended version of this teamwork at more than 22 minutes. Initially Miura  cannily alternates faux-romantic swells with inner string chiming, a motif that is picked up and doubled by Zabelka’s almost unbroken fiddle drones as Casserley’s program projects whooshes, slides and shakes.  While the violinist uses sul ponticello strokes to sound out a half-orotund/half obstreperous theme variation, and the electronic indications turn progressively dissident, the pianist plays on unperturbed, adapting dissidence to her cadences and completing the piece with a final single piano note.

Casserley continues to make a strong case for the integration of a signal processing instrument within improvising music and his five associates on both discs cooperate with him to show how it should be done.

–Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Fields: 1. Field 1 2. Field 2

Personnel: Fields: Harri Sjöström (soprano, sopranino saxophones, selected mutes); Floris Floridis (clarinet, bass clarinet); Guilherme Rodrigues (cello) and Lawrence Casserley (signal processing instrument)

Track Listing: Parallel: 1. Conflux in Göteborg 2. Infinite Realities 3. Relative Alternity 4. Strata in Stockholm 5. Mirror to Mirror 6. Encore in Ostrava 6:37

Personnel: Parallel: Mia Zabelka (violin and voice); Yoko Miura (piano and melodica) and Lawrence Casserley (signal processing instrument)