Mysteries of Materiality and Transformation
By Stuart Broomer
I know of no musician who more strongly invokes the given material world –
“nature” — than the percussionist Toma Gouband and have appreciated his
work since Courant des Vents (“Wind Current”) his first solo
recording (released on psi in 2012 and reissued in April 2025 on Bandcamp. In a sense, he
might be considered the master drummer of the natural world, sometimes
using a horizontal bass drum as a resonator for lithophones (that is, rocks
used as percussion instruments), sometimes striking stones together, or,
alternatively, playing a conventional drum kit with tree branches (that
begin with their leaves intact) as sticks. Watching Gouband play a solo in
the latter manner on the stage of the Gulbenkian Foundation’s outdoor
amphitheatre with Evan Parker and Matt Wright’s Trance Maps at the 2023
edition of Jazz em Agosto, surrounded by trees and coloured lights, the
leaves and twigs disintegrating into their own ascendant, multi-colored
dust clouds, was among the most profound visual representations of music
that I have ever witnessed.
As with Courant des Vents,
Un Peu Plus Loin
is a re-issue, first issued on CD in 2020, it coincided with the height of
the Covid-19 outbreak and shutdown and received little attention. It was
issued on Bandcamp in December 2024. The mystery of the natural world is at
the root of Un Peu Plus Loin (“A Little Further”), which began as
the middle segment of a three-part installation, Desert, by
conceptual artist/sculptor Stéphane Thidet, set in the ancient Cistertian
Maubuisson Abbey, founded in 1236 by Blanche of Castile, at thetime Queen
of France. “The segment invokes the mysterious moving rocks of “Racetrack
Playa, a dried-up lake in California’s Death Valley. While the stones move
(perhaps the result of the slow processes of freezing and thawing), leaving
tracks (an image recreated in the rocks and trails in clay of Thidet’s
sculpture), they have never been seen to move.”
After the performance, struck by the experience and the Abbey’s special
resonance, Gouband writes “I returned alone to improvise in the suspended
and mysterious presence of the rocks and their traces. Eleven minutes were
extracted and then sent to four inventive electroacoustic musicians, each
of whom created a variation from this base. What emerges is an intimate
connection with the spirit of the work, an interstellar conversation, a
setting in motion.” (The preceding two paragraphs contain material
translated and/or paraphrased from Gouband’s notes on the Bandcamp page).
The resultant pieces are named by fragments of that phrase
Un Peu Plus Loin
.
Un is Gouband’s original 11-minute improvisation. Its combination
of spaces and echoes and brief rolls and elisions around a drum surface and
metal percussion create an extraordinary atmosphere in keeping with the
underlying phenomenon being represented here—that is the rolling rocks. As
it develops that sense of rolling spheres, like ball bearings on the head
of a drum, the work becomes increasing mobile, increasingly evocative. If
there are drum solos like this inspired by mysterious spheres, then rolling
rocks become a privileged phenomenon, never to be observed, yet known,
occurring in an interval of human absence. It is a percussion improvisation
of unimaginable subtlety, a percussion solo of the imagination, a kind of
natural phenomenon in which an artist approaches a profound mystery.
In “Peu’ by Roman Bestion, Gouband’s rolls are apt to move backwards,
Reversed sounds grow in volume, metallic percussion multipies, somehow the
desert grows aqueous, the burbling of scuba tanks grows louder, appear amid
whispers of electronics and is then sustained, a bass underlay. An organ
emerges, a deep bass drum, all the live sounds of Gouband’s kit embrace
their phantom others.
In Plus, by Christophe Havard, drum strokes will retreat into the
distance. The environment seems more electronic, also more distant, with
imitations of glitches, skips and sudden interpolations of unaltered
sounds. Extended tones suggest winds, ultimately the sound of subterranean
echo chambers (reminiscent of the sounds of John Butcher’s tour of
abandoned Scottish architecture ( Resonant Spaces [Confront 17]);
the strangely gothic organ solo constructed under complex drumming, suggest
the rolling stones occupy an epic, underground cavern/cathedral, sometimes
growing louder among the stones’ special resonance…then drifting away, the
stones growing quieter as if they are moving out of the frame of our
hearing…
In Loin by Matthew Wright, there is further submersion, the
echoing stones a background to sounds foregrounded yet ironically muffled,
gradually expanded to feedback trilling, an increasingly complex chart of
artificial distances and multiple competing clicks and whispers, with
Hammond organ dribbles against elastic and metallic percussion instruments.
All the sounds are shifting then: sudden upward glissandi, patchwork
scratches and rubbery stretches.
The concluding piece, Juan Parra’s Desert, is the longest of these
works (11:57) and the most strongly connected to the sounds of the
original. At the beginning, preserved drum strokes background metallic
scraping, some sounds echoing acoustically with the same degree of
resonance as Gouband’s own, but here there are other sounds as well as those
tangible forms of the original. It is as if a lost explorer has found a
dusty sea and a soggy desert, all materiality open to sudden and
substantial self-opposition, the wind growing stronger, the drone
interchangeable, the metal strokes of the originating drums turned into a
sustained unearthly force. The subterranean winds that move the stones, the
undercurrents of earthly tides and tilts, are as subtle and forceful as a
poet’s unsought dreams.
Perhaps there is another magnetism lost and found in the moving stones,
here recovered in Gouband’s instruments, those materials lost and found in
nature herein heard initially acoustically, are then reformed and reborn in
the imaginative applications of technology. Embracing, expanding,
extrapolating on a mystery, bridging spirit and materiality, this recording
feels like what more music should be doing.