#otoroku

Electrical currency serves as an apposite analogy for the alchemy that is the British trio Decoy joined by Joe McPhee. AC/DC is their fourth recording together, this time documenting a May concert date from last year at the café space that lends the hosting label half of its name. Bassist John Edwards and drummer Steve Noble are regulars in rhythm sections there. Keyboardist Alexander Hawkins is a frequent fixture, too. Decoy is a working group and a heady amalgam that recalls a dream fusion of Atlantis-era Sun Ra, Keith Jarrett’s marathon electric stand with Miles at the Cellar Door, and Larry Young circa his Blue Note moonshot Contrasts, while still relentlessly retaining its own flight plan.

“When the building is still standing in the end, we’ve failed.”

Advancing years and eroding hyperbole have forced saxophonist Charles Gayle to revise his once (in)famous rejoinder. Now officially an octogenarian beset by the occasional ailments and infirmities the distinction can entail, the ear-scalding free jazz blowouts of his younger days are no longer the default setting. That shift from lion in autumn to one in winter is part of what makes Seasons Changing such an engaging and ultimately edifying listen. Gayle’s iconoclastic rep of old, curiously seasoned with equal dollops of artistic and religious dogma, could feel mesmerizing or off-putting depending on the audience. Here he’s forced to contend with and adapt to senior physiology that no longer guarantees marathon, altissimo tongues-speaking as God-given right.

Armed with Clippy EM272 stereo microphones and undisclosed instrumentation, the South Korean sound artist Suk Hong elides the boundaries and ellipses between the performed and overheard on his new album Pedigree for the Otoroku label. Reedy synthesizers, pipe organ drones, oscillating sine tones and percussive static rippled through by a late burst of mallets seem to merge steadily with the litany of sounds which he captured as he walked and commuted around Seoul, with his microphones all the while hanging from his backpack.

Imagine everything you know has become strange and unfamiliar Without warning Overnight You've woken up to it Imagine the town where you live

Imagine everything you know has become strange and unfamiliar Without warning Overnight You've woken up to it Imagine the town where you live Its rivers, roads, canals All once definitely parallel And now one deep and widespread movement

You might rub your eyes And lean for support on the window of your room But that broad channel of gray water now suspends the land And you can no longer see the pavements Yet you know where you've walked And with eyes closed you could locate the traffic lights The crossing, its railings But won't you open them The road would still be gone

You pack a small bag A few dry things And you raise some courage to weight it out And through it But what should be kept outside has come inside And it's waiting downstairs It's discordant And the ways you know to live are lost

To understand what I'm telling you You've to imagine your orientation is off Think of the lines and angles of your hometown Its buildings, the streets you know implicitly and learned without attention Remember how, on occasion, you walked home blind drunk Or being surprised by the inside of a shop already Having been entirely absorbed by your phone These navigations, these habits of your body Are now impossible suggestions

And somewhere the rivers burst their banks And the groundwater in sewages risen And the canals have overflowed And the air at your door smells bad And the main road is now not the quickest exit Because its straightness is channelling the water And an imperative is building: "Leave home." And so you do You don't bother to secure or shut the door It's gone wrong in there now, anyway

I figure the colour of slate Sits on the newly formed bank of what is now a deep and widespread river And everything is settled and morphed A thin undulation A slight sense of movement Has replaced the earlier furor And there are no drowning bodies now that are either dead or saved And on the periphery, people come to rest Exhausted, bundled on rooves And they take with birds and others animals To call out into the night because they want to go back home and can't

And at the edge of all of this At the edge of the water This figure holds a child Cradled Until it's plunged Then lifted And nursed And supported Before it's let drop Again

This drama is enacted This drowning and saving Drowning and saving And the child's limbs dangle And are weighted somehow Might be asleep, might not be But it matches very closely The description of any other child