As an improvising composer and keyboardist, Thollem exists apart from every other musician, ignoring accepted conventions of how music is made by setting up his own. Further, Thollem thrives on spontaneity and he has the wherewithal to leverage technology to accomplish his aims in that way.
He accomplished that yet again with his newest album Worlds In A Life, Two (ESP-Disk), which is essentially a companion piece to Worlds In A Life, One, another collection of novel music made from a novel process.
The script is the same as it was for Worlds In A Life, One: Thollem curates samples of previous recordings he made with Nels Cline, Terry Riley, William Parker, Pauline Oliveros and Michael Wimberly, then puts those samples into a sonic blender called a Korg Wavestate. This piece of equipment enables him to instantly regenerate sounds made organically into whole new instant compositions.
The very extempore nature of this process is the very thing that makes it produce different art each time, and beyond that, Thollem elected to build this collection from nine shorter tracks rather than two long ones the previous time.
The musique concrète of these tracks puts together and deforms sounds from disparate sources, yet somehow feels of a live, organic performance jolted by sharp edits. Which is, in a sense, what this is. On certain pieces, Thollem chooses to feature Cline’s guitar (“Sounds From Memory”) or Wimberly’s drums (“Conversations On The Way”), tossing in shards of Parker’s bass and Pauline Oliveros’ MIDI accordion along the way.
“Tongues We Think In” takes a different tact in sourcing music entirely (or nearly so) from Riley’s voices, the samples of which played on a keyboard, making the voices resemble a synthesized string section more than vox humana. “Chagudah” also uses voices at the exclusion of everything else, a mixture of atonal speech sped up, slow down, diced and puréed.
But more often than not, Thollem pulls from so many sources and contorts them so it’s nearly impossible to even tell which instrument you’re hearing, but the alien sounds as strained through the Wavestate are provocative and oddly entrancing. Music this otherworldly and complex used to take time to put together. In doing so on the fly, Thollem puts the impulsiveness into this recycled music that you can’t get by pondering over it too long.
Order Worlds In A Life, Two from Bandcamp.
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