Point of Departure

PATRICK BRENNAN / ABDUL MOIMÊME
terraphonia

Stuart Broomer
Ezz-thetics Column
September, 2019

That sense of dream logic is central as well to terraphonia (Creative Sources) by the duo of New Yorker patrick brennan on alto saxophone and Lisboan Abdul Moimême on expanded guitar. While they have long been acquainted, their musical orientations are fundamentally different. brennan plays within a sense of the jazz continuum, a highly expressive player possessed of a brilliant economy of line, akin to similarly laconic players like Frode Gjerstad and the young (and perhaps most individualistic) John Tchicai. brennan’s use of silence is more about space for reflection than drama, a heightened awareness, and he can infest a fragment of a scale with tremendous psychic weight. Moimême comes from the free jazz tradition, but he’s very much a free improviser. He has thoroughly reimagined the guitar, standing between two horizontal instruments, sometimes covering them in sheet metal and playing them with e-bows, mallets and other devices. His palette is as varied and his sounds as bright and specific (and not dissimilar) as those of an early Cage percussion piece or a Harry Partch ensemble, an orchestra that consists of percussion and strings, acoustic, amplified and electronic sounds. The music is a dance between brennan’s linear, highly inflected (mutated, vocalic, emotive, personal) lines and Moimême’s variety theatre universe in which models of order and entropy are repeatedly proposed and erased.

There’s a startling moment (among many) at the beginning of ndụ enweghị ihe abụọ / no two (Brennan’s titles involve multiple languages, here Igbo and English, as well as compounds and neologisms) in which brennan’s line is moving from emotive cries to a complex lyricism, all of it embraced by a matching foghorn melody and an expanding orchestra. The music’s continuity is complex, an absolutely shared creation. As a parallel, Partch’s piece for Chet Baker, “Ulysses Departs from the Edge of the World” – combining  bass marimba, tuned bamboo drums, trumpet and baritone saxophone – may feel like a distant precursor (recently recorded by the ensemble Partch in its original form on Sonata Dementia [Bridge]). The brief gotabrilhar is sufficiently powerful and detailed to deny any attempt at description.

original review at Point of Departure: Ezz-thetics, paragraphs 6 & 7