American-born, Swiss-residing Stephan Thelen has for quite a while been a guitarist and composer who has taken deep dives into groove-based, electronic math rock, with jazz elements, residing artistically in an area somewhere between Robert Fripp and David Torn. His interest in those areas — in addition to classical and minimalism — has led to intriguing music put to tape as both a solo artist and leading groups. One of those groups has been the two-guitar quartet Sonar, and their last three releases added Torn to the mix.
Thelen has returned to solo work of late with his Fractal Guitar albums that extend ideas kicked around with Sonar, going deeper into minimalism by using delay effects to create odd-timed rhythms. At the same time, Thelen sought to leave more room for individual expression. With Fractal Sextet, he takes these two seemingly opposing ideas into an even challenging structure by carrying out this strategy within a cooperative group setting.
The collection of six players making up the Fractal Sextet besides Thelen involved both protagonists of the atmospheric prog/fusion Burnt Belief project: guitarist Jon Durant and bassist Colin Edwin. Expanding the international flavor of this band, Italian keyboardist Fabio Anile and Swiss percussionist Andi Pupato was also brought on board and on Edwin’s suggestion, so was Israeli drummer Yogev Gabay. Everyone but Gabay and Edwin appeared on prior Fractal albums but the ‘new’ rhythm section is built for this kind of stuff.
In going septet, Thelen has even more sonic possibilities available to him, and he takes full advantage of that. He of course uses his ‘fractal’ concept as the starting point, but it ends with the special abilities of each of these players. This is epitomized well on “Mise en Abyme,” where a David Gilmour-esque guitar weep brackets Edwin’s longing bass lines, but listen deeper and all these subtleties coming from elsewhere are revealed, like organ flourishes and rhythm guitar tightly integrated to the whole percussive layer.
“Zeptoscope” is a deep, deep groove not too far removed from Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin’s ritual groove music but having the added benefit of Edwin’s unwavering, metronomic pulse. Anile’s circular piano figure sets the shape of “Planet Nine” but quickly the guitars, bass and drums fill out their parts of an intricately syncopated groove machine. There’s no conventional song structure, the simple riff serves as a foundation for individual solos (including Gabay’s) and group-based harmonic development.
“Fractal 5.7” blends floating textures with the resonating dual-guitar rhythms from Thelen and Durant, Durant’s yearning lead guitar adding a key lyrical element. “Slow Over Fast” starts slow but about halfway through, slows down as the density of the instrumentation dissipates, revealing just how sophisticated Thelen’s rhythm structures are.
With Fractal Sextet, Stephan Thelen doesn’t necessarily introduce new ideas, but he takes good ideas he already developed and puts them into a new framework. That makes the music that resulted from this sound just as fresh.
Fractal Sextet drops on September 16, courtesy of Alchemy Records. Get it here on Bandcamp.
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