Altered Forms Trio have been playing together since 2019 and the opening
track of this album renders this fact obvious – the interactions between
the musicians express a familiarity and comfort, a sort of gentle
confidence
that each knows they are safe in the presence of the others. Indeed, my
immediate, initial, impression of this album was that it was
complacent
. The piano’s tinkling opening with the gentle ‘phhwwhip’ of Robert
Lucaciu’s double-bass, accompanied by a sort of intermittent rattling sound
on the drums is so standard, so trope-ish, that I think I might
actually have rolled my eyes…
Imagine, then, my surprise when, just as I was settling into the
not-so-challenging aspects of the album, just when I had resigned myself to
listening to circa 41 minutes of this sonic beige, Gregor Forbes’ gentle
piano and Johannes von Buttlar’s ‘gently rattling jazz drums’ violently
pivot into a really frenetic piece of music led by a pounding double-bass
that sounds like it’s being chased around an unevenly inflated balloon. Just
as you get the sense that the musicians have grown too comfortable
together to be excited with each other’s playing, everything switches – the
music becomes innovative and interesting; the complacency turns to
excitement, the comfort turns to invigoration, the familiarity turns to
desperation.
And this shift doesn’t occur just once or twice, it’s the defining feature
of the album. The strange and radical changes in mood, tone, style and
energy between songs creates a sort of aesthetic incoherence – and not just
between tracks, but often within the songs themselves. This makes
the overall dynamic of the album intellectually challenging to access;
individually, the songs mostly work on their own (internal) terms, but as a
collection it requires a bit more from the listener.
On my initial listen-through of this album a review formed in my mind that
said something like ‘there are occasional flourishes of brilliance,
interspersed, for some bizarre reason, with what appear to be moments of
unneeded respite’. Without careful attention, the performance will sound at
points too generic, then at others too academic, then at others still, too
mundane. But the album rewards attention and close (and, in my case,
repeated
) listening… The first time I listened through I got to the end of the
album and had the vague sense that I found it too generic to comment on,
too generic to write a review about. The second time I listened to the
album, I was genuinely shocked I had the impression I did after the first
listen. It was, to my surprise, pretty good! By the time I gave the
album a third listen, I was positively into it. I might be revealing my own
limitations here (no bad thing, perhaps), but it’s only when you realise
what the album is doing, the unsettling way it moves from avant-garde and
experimental to something approaching (but not quite) cliché, that you
realise the nearly-generic-sounding ‘respite’ moments are themselves part
of the avant-garde-adjacent context setting for the strange and joyous
playfulness that the album leans into.
Is this effect intentional? And, if so, why take the risk? In a world where
everyone has an at-hand near infinite supply of streamable jazz, producing
a slowly percolating album is quite the risk. People, or at least,
algorithms, will not often give you the chance to make a first impression,
let alone a second or third. Albums like this show what is wrong with the
passive consumption model on which many services are based. Buy this album
for this reason alone. Listen to it repeatedly for the reasons I’ve given
prior to this.