jazz.pt
patrick brennan / Abdul Moimême: terraphonia
(Creative Sources)
RUI EDUARDO PAES
July 26, 2019
Those familiar with both patrick brennan’s and Abdul Moimême’s discographies have a lot to be surprised by with terraphonia. On one hand, we encounter with the saxophonist a nonlinear and fragmentary discourse that goes way beyond any of his previous implementations of space and breath — in ways that had never before contrasted so much with typical jazz phrasing, free included. As for the guitarist (who’d once been a student of brennan, but on another instrument, the tenor saxophone), we hear an acoustic inclination far closer to the percussive rituals of Z’ev and Harry Partch’s invented instrument music than to what we’re usually familiar with in the territories surrounding experimental electronics. If on Moimême’s solo albums, or in his collaborations with, for example, Ernesto Rodrigues, it’s still the guitar we hear, here it’s the preparations he’s applying to this cordaphone that gain the foreground — the strings of the two guitars being used simultaneously simply serve to amplify the sounds of the large plates and metal sculptures he’s using.
And yet, this alto saxophone still reveals much of the grain and grammars that come from the “loft generation”, at times even leading us toward other jazz logics — for example, the soft but geometric, cool lyricism of a Lee Konitz, and these prepared guitars never elude indebtedness to earlier research and discovery accomplished by a lineage of explorers that range from Fred Frith to noisemakers such as Terry Ex and Andy Moor. In other words, if this collection of seven pieces presents numerous and varied references, the music created seems an attempt to find a new paradigm, and this is particularly evident on the superb track entitled gotabrilhar. There could be no better example of a visual music, not because it was played to accompany or suggest moving images driven by plot, but rather because it in itself functions as cinema.