#cecilia lopez

As a bassist, Lopez defies the sacred conventions of his instrument, inventing his own language with it. He plays every inch of the bass, slapping, scraping, hitting and wiping it as if it’s a large drum. He plucks, strums, bows and attacks the massive instrument with flurries of gesticulation. When choosing sparring partners, he looks for likeminded innovators, those who march through unique sonic territory without regard to what’s considered conventional. His septet combines many of these sound warriors into a single molten mind, the epitome of sonic groupthink.

Nada Sagrada began as “the gospel of sans,” a multimedia commission he performed with his septet at the 2023 Vision Festival, accompanied by Gill Arno’s live visual manipulations. Mixed down for pressing onto CD, the 40-minute-long composition takes up space without inducing claustrophobia. There are moments of dense thorniness where the full ensemble unleashes fiery energy, but these are balanced by quieter periods marked by a subset of the players probing each other with a refreshing subtlety.

This is a unique marriage of strings (Lopez’s bass, Mat Maneri’s viola and DoYeon Kim’s gayageum), electronics (Cecilia Lopez providing synthesis and Zeena Parkins playing electric harp), and drums (courtesy of Gerald Cleaver and Tom Rainey). Parkins and Cecilia Lopez conjure otherworldly textures that dance around and weave through deep arco drones and the sprightly plucks of the gayageum. Cleaver and Rainey lock onto each other, bringing about periods of intense polyrhythmic clatter. When the tide turns toward the introspective, the drummers fall back to a low energy orbit, adding spare frictional interjections and supportive patter when appropriate. Collectively, the players invoke their subconscious sensory network to realize this passionate and thought-provoking piece. It’s a call to arms, harkening back to the radical roots of fire music itself.

The disc brims and bristles with similar moments. “A la vuelta de Greenwich” begins with the grinding of what sounds like processed  soprano saxophone which then dips and dives forward with Lopez’s response, delivered in swooping curves. It’s so tempting to pull a Hendrix or Prince sonic reference or two out of Laubrock’s quasi-linear distorto-shredding, but her playing is equally atomistic, evident as “Fabulations” stutters onward. The collaborators occupy an entirely different space in “Don’t Believe It”’s murky opening drones, shards and atoms replaced by sustains while the minuscule elements of microtone and breath vanguard themselves with startling clarity. Each overtone and harmonic bubbles to the surface of a brew equal parts spice and strength and garnished with amplified attacks and piquant saxophone scales at an almost tender volume.

It would be difficult to imagine a more symbiotic approach to duetting. The players’ respective sound pallets are remarkably close, unnervingly integrated in terms of articulation and sonic envelope. If the opening conglomerate of “I Don’t See It” doesn’t convince, as it inhabits a shuddering world of rhythmic ambiguity even as pitches swirl in and out of distorted focus, nothing will. Best of all though, the sounds are all but bone-dry. So many electroacoustic collaborations rely far too heavily on reverb and delay, presumably to enhance repetition. They travel down long corridors of memory, their edges and intimacies obscured to the point of ineffectuality. Laubrock and Lopez confidently square each gesture against a backdrop of something that isn’t really silence but often threatens to be. Each musician’s prickly and mellifluous spontaneities hit the ear with a stunning directness that adds to their musicality and allows all of that precious counterpoint to be heard. Repeated audition shows the moments of freedom to be components of a larger and wonderfully formed dialogue fashioned of concise and adventurous interactions, each moment a kind of aphoristic poetry in sound as direct as it is poignant.

Red is an idea that can be conveyed as an installation, a solo performance, or a piece played by several musicians. All versions share certain essential ingredients. You need a room with a reasonably high ceiling and a means to suspend one or more nets, which are woven from speaker wire. Inside the nets are resonant acoustic instruments; this recording features two, one full of double basses and another full of drums. The microphones inside one net pick up the sounds of the enclosed instruments and generate feedback, and, since basses and drums can double as speakers, those sounds can be fed into the instruments in the other net. Each net is capable of making sound on its own and its vibrations can induce changes in that sound, but, for good measure, a person can also swing the net to induce more changes.

Red (DB) documents a version with musicians. The composer plays synthesizer, Brandon Lopez (no relation) plays bass and Gerald Cleaver plays drums. You can watch them performing the piece on YouTube and Lopez’ website, and it’s edifying to watch how it’s done. The drummer and bassist keep their eyes on the score, playing with a restraint quite unlike the bruising free jazz that they play in the Brandon Lopez Trio. A movement artist and the composer give the nets a nudge every now and then, and the latter also tends to her synthesizer, shaping a steady, machine-like grind. Observation makes clear how each action, whether guided or spontaneous, influences the evolving sound field.

But the item under consideration here is the recording. Without visual cues, it’s hard to say what comes from the nets and what’s coming out of the synthesizer. The bass, played with abrupt drags of the bow, groans and distorts, while Cleaver favors friction and unaccented beats. Listeners who dig coarse texture will luxuriate, but if you dig tunes, you may well get lost. Shudder presses against rumble, while hums undulate within. It all feels like even more of an abstraction than your average CD of improvised music, but that’s an observation, not a criticism. As the piece progresses, it’s easy to forget that people and instruments are involved, and to feel like you’re hearing some sped-up broadcast of the earth’s plates grinding against each other. Which goes to show that even when your experience of Red lacks the opportunity to witness how it’s done, its systemic essence is undeniable. No island, after all, is separate from the world.