Over the last dozen years, keyboardist Thollem and guitarist Nels Cline combined their musical outlier skills to make six uncompromising improvisational albums, a few of which we covered here and there. The Thollem/Cline Trio put the Thollem/Cline pair with a succession of notable third members, such as Pauline Oliveros, William Parker, Michael Wimberly and — most recently — minimalist godfather Terry Riley.
Releasing hot on the heels of the Thollem/Cline/Riley collab The Light Is Real, Worlds In A Life, One (February 9 2024, ESP-Disk) is a reconstitution of sampled parts taken from all six of these releases, a task performed single-handedly by Thollem using a Wavestate.
The Korg Wavestate is a digital wave sequencer synthesizer that enables Thollem to distill these samples into wholly new compositions, and to do so on the fly. As I type this the recordings of Worlds In A Life, One are barely a month old. There are plans for a Worlds In A Life, Two to be released in April 2024 even though those recordings don’t yet exist at this writing.
There are only two, eighteen-minute tracks of these sound collages, “Every Twist” and “Every Turn.” The music is made from piano, guitar, drums, organ, acoustic bass, MIDI-accordion and even a human voice from time to time. Sometimes you hear many of these instruments at once, other times, just one. The remarkable thing about this is, it often flows without the abundance of abruptness typically heard when shards of recordings are spliced together the old, manual way.
At times, it sounds like all the musicians are in the room together organically playing what is heard on this record; other times, it is more apparently pulled together from disparate sources and run through tactful manipulation. Yet, the process of creating Thollem’s Frankensteins involved just as much instinct and impulse as the source material did.
But the point, I believe, isn’t to make it sound organic or artificial. Rather, it’s to make something entirely new using used parts created by various trios and mold them into a genuine piece of aural art made by six performers, using the intuition of one.
That’s just what Worlds In A Life, One achieves.
Pre-order Worlds In A Life, One here on Bandcamp.
