By Dan Sorrells
Laura Altman’s Holy Trinity takes its name from the Anglican church
in Western Australia where it was recorded. It doesn’t seem directly
concerned with that classic trio of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but as I
read the label’s notes about the release, they offered up another apt
trinity in the context of Altman’s solo improvisational practice:
instrument, environment, and intervention. I’d like to slightly complicate
that last one. Let’s say: int(erv)ention, the hazy crossroads of intention
and intervention, that wavering boundary between what you put into the world
and how the world meets it.
I first encountered Altman’s clarinet along with accordionist Monica Brooks
and piano-deconstructionist Magda Mayas in the brilliant improvising trio
Great Waitress. Altman’s solo work shares many of the same concerns:
multiple sound sources converging in new timbres, emergent phenomena from
the layering of overtones, the use of gaps and silences to emphasize or
regather. Rather than responding to bandmates, on Holy Trinity
Altman positions her clarinet, voice, and small objects like tin cans in
dialogue with more contingent forces—some environmental, some of her own
devising—fragile and volatile feedback from a small amplifier, tape
interjections from handheld cassette players, reflections and distortions of
reverberant space, birdsong in the churchyard.
The starting and ending tracks “Opening Out” and “Turning In” do well to
describe the dual aspect of the music, a double movement of eruption and
irruption, Altman unfolding her sounds into the receptive room and enfolding
those it gives back. She works in pure, swelling tones, often alternating
between registers to create slowly pulsing cycles of low and high, pushing
into altissimo notes that seem on the cusp of existence and at the edge of
control, as frail as the feedback she duets with. Tracks like “A Call to
Water” and “The Song I Came to Sing” trouble the boundaries between clarinet
or voice or speaker, delicate ecosystems of sound that cloud agency and
confound temporal order. This causal erosion seems to float things off into
an incorporeal realm of sound-in-itself, and yet there’s a forceful
grounding element that is always present, a strong feeling of embodiment and
place, Altman’s inward breaths the caesurae punctuating the overlapping
resonances—that palpable, vibrating air within Holy Trinity.
In a remarkably harmonious passage, Barry Blesser once wrote of a clarinet
note sounding in a cathedral which could be thought of as “a million bells,
each with its own pitch, and each with a slightly different decay rate,” the
clarinet exciting those reverberating frequencies such that “you are
actually hearing the bells of space.” As I’m listening to
Holy Trinity,
I’m hearing Altman’s patient exploration, offering and accepting in return,
ringing variously the sacred bells of space. This may not be devotional
music, but it still feels like an exaltation.