Tetragrammaton - Point of Convergence [Utech Records - 2010]First off - this is an excellent, wonderful album, from the highly acclaimed Utech Records label, and one of the most intriguing and carefully considered explorations of the higher realms of experimental music that I have heard in a long time. Following on from their debut album Elegy For Native Tongues, from a few years ago, the three members of Tetragrammaton play and integrate a variety of more unusual instruments, from waterphones and crystal bowls, to gongs, hydrophones, hurdy-gurdy's and frame drums, but also the more familiar saxophone, rhodes piano and electric guitar. They have produced a near-perfect album which alternates between subtle, playful reveries such as the paradisaical waterbowls and tinkling bells of Portrait of Turab (Parts 1 and 2) to the discordant sax, drums and percussion which swirl up to a resonant, epic crescendo in the invigorating Disjecta Membra. The eclectic patch-work of influences and impulses - free jazz, loop/drone, psychedelic rock, musique concrete and traditional/ethnic East Asian music, to name but a few - can be ascertained immediately, but there is no cheap plagiarism or shoddy, half-hearted attempts at pushing the envelope here; just true craftsmanship and talent, all galvanised into a rich, improvisatory, multi-layered sound which creates a weird, haunting, delightful spectrum of different dimensions on each track. There are melodies and motifs which follow through and connect each piece, but some of them are so fabulously nebulous, fine and inchoate, that I would be hard-pressed to define which instruments created them. The vibrating drones and sounds of the track Sol de Paula is a good example. It starts off quite ambient and tender, then gradually builds into a dark smorgasbord of various free-flowing instrumentation, which is - paradoxically - featherweight and airy, yet loaded and heavy; simultaneously cacophonous and harmonious. Similarly, Sylibin Therapy creates a strange, mercurial atmosphere which isn't easy to put into words - always evidence of something amorphous, poetic and beautiful - utilising neurotic, scatter-shot, insect-like percussive elements conjoined with slightly bestial, hardly discernible, low-end vocals, insistent electric guitar and (what I take to be) the Japanese string instrument the Taisho-koto. If you want name-checks in terms of influences, then you could say that John Zorn, Tony Conrad, Faust, Soft Machine, Sun Ra, Fushitsusha, Acid Mothers Temple, Taj Mahal Travellers and a host of traditional Japanese or East Asian musicians, which I wouldn't necessarily know, are all here, somewhere, but these are only seeds or parallels to the music - this is radical, refined and wholly original 'free-improv-psych-drone', for want of a better term which could entirely encompass this unique art-piece. Tetragrammaton create pure and unadulterated, ingenious music - it is miles ahead of some of the other so-called 'experimental' or 'out-there' drone or improv based music - these musicians don't need to show off with shallow, bombastic pyrotechnics or pop-softened, emotionally manipulative atmospherics - they self-evidently have authentic, vital artistry free-flowing through their veins and this album is a towering and sublime sound-sculpture formed from the life-blood of their multifarious, prodigious energies and talent. James DC
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