#thin wrist

Here’s the best part about “WZN#3-Verso”: it’s a swelling wave, rolling thunder, one of I Was Real’s most exciting moments and you don’t need to know anything about its construction to enjoy it. All that stuff about overdubs and everything else in the last paragraph is for record nerds, Discogs ogres, formalists, and critics. Yes, 75 Dollar Bill makes music by and for music geeks, but at their best, as they often are on I Was Real, they also make thrillingly direct body music, rooted in tradition and totally far out, the sort of avant-democratic jive that Henry Flynt’s bands never quite nailed. You don’t need to show your underground credentials and identify who “Tetuzi Akiyama” is to get lost in its massive stomp, the blurring boundaries of the guitar and sax’s taffy-like timbres and the way they trade off melodic fragments, fulfilling James Brown’s apocryphal dictum, “Every instrument a drum!” Even the side long faux-raga of the title track is rhythmic and sly enough to, like all good meditations, engage body and brain in equal measure. Truly weird, but never experimental for its own sake, I Was Real is just accessible enough that Bo Diddley, RL Burnside, Chen’s one time tutor Jeiche Ould Chigaly, and your world music/blues loving parents might grudgingly dig it. 

At 69 minutes, I Was Real is a lot to take in. Newcomers are advised to start with W/M/P/P/R/R, the concise, big band counterpart to I Was Real’s occasionally meandering chamber music. Still, I Was Real is sure to puzzle and please whether your devotion to rock and roll and its antecedents is intellectual or physical. Sure, all of that stuff about Mauritanian modes, compound rhythms, and microtones is interesting, but when “Every Last Coffee or Tea” levitates you, all that matters is the music: strange, familiar, stark, funky and new under the sun. 

His biography yields some clues. Born of French and Japanese parents and raised in France, he is by training a third-generation classical musician. But even though he participated in many years of classical learning and practice, he never quite cottoned to the family business, and in his 20s, he broke from it. He began playing improvised music, and after a period of seeking education from improvisers, he based himself for a time in New York. Since then, he has performed with musicians from either side of the Atlantic, including Joachim Badenhorst, Pascal Niggenkemper, Jeremiah Cymerman, Duane Pitre and Christoph Erb. More recently, Loriot received his mail in Zurich, Switzerland, where this LP was recorded. 

What Loriot has played with other musicians has often related in some way to classical practice. For examply, Baloni, his trio with Badenhorst and Niggenkemper, sounded like a chamber ensemble, albeit one that drew heavily upon the vocabulary of improvised music. But his solo music’s relationship to the classical tradition is one of refutation. The lot of most classical musicians is not that different from that of highly skilled factory workers; they learn to do what others tell them to do, and their work depends upon their ability to satisfactorily make something that has been determined by designers and institutional decision-makers. In an interview on the Thin Wrist website, Loriot describes his alienation from the music, its social-political structures. He chose not to play that game, and every time he plays a sound that would earn opprobrium in that context, he’s refuting it anew. 

But that doesn’t mean that While Whirling is just an expression of rebellion. It is a concentration of acts of making, for what is improvised music, but an enactment of making and finishing something for a present or anticipated audience? It is also a modeling of fluid, evolving relationships that deal with questions as well as known quantities. What’s this sound worth? What can this instrument really do? How does one combine conventional and unconventional sounds, and why should anyone care? The constants in Loriot’s music are his use of the viola, and the tension he generates with it. Whether it’s a brute rasp, a barely-there whisper, or an isolated pluck and its consequent reverberations, he makes sounds that demand to be heard. This music isn’t about remembering events past, or soothing some part of your mind while you do your daily tasks; it’s about making the most of a moment, delivering a charge to a space you entered and a moment that began when you sat in your seat or put the tone arm on the record, one that will end when you walk out of the room, or when the needle either picks up or doesn’t (one side ends in a locked groove). It’s about Loriot’s presence in a present, which in turns influences your present. It’s real, right now. Consider it a gift. 

Like its predecessor, Descension opens with a big blast of noise. But it isn’t a recognizably reedy sound. Besides his tenor saxophone, Shiroishi wields a selection of effects, many of which one would be more likely to find at Guitar Center than the Horn Connection. The first sound on the record is a stab of feedback that sharpens, shudders, and then morphs into some more recognizable saxophonic sounds. The horn emits short shudders, which gets looped in order to support a bluesy melody. As the looped melody multiplies, Shiroishi builds that blues into a highly emotive but carefully controlled ventilation of anguish. That piece is followed by another loop-based construction, “Grandchildren of the Camps,” on which Shiroishi’s lead voice stands atop a heaving platform of see-sawing reeds. It’s not as harsh as the first track, but even more elegiac in tone.  

The other side opens with the album’s most free jazz-like moment. Unenhanced by pedals, Shiroishi punches out brief, furious phrases that are more reminiscent of Peter Brötzmann than John Coltrane. Then a hellish miasma of electronic distortion rises up behind him, evoking another predecessor — Borbetomagus. Like that trio, Shiroishi can peel your face with noise. But unlike them, he seems to have something in mind beyond sheer sonic sensation; the name of the piece, “Tomorrow is Almost Over,” may be hopeful or despairing, but it wants you to know something, and think about what you know. Then the final track, “Above the Black Heavens is Endless,” gives literal voice to Shiroishi’s sentiments as he sings through the same rig that’s encrusted his tenor’s tone. The entire album lasts less than 27 minutes, and that feels like enough to get the message across.