Even when everything appears close to silence, Thollem McDonas continues to shelter a brain bubbling with ideas, occasionally coming to him in serendipitous fashion. It is not every day that one wakes up and sees a ray of light through the window while thinking of the words “the light is real” and “Terry Riley” (and there is no doubt that around the latter the light is in fact real, and has been for decades now). Less likely still is the continuation of this epiphany, culminating in a long-distance contact between the two during a sadly well-known seclusion period.
At this point, the ordinary student would think, two proficient keyboardists must surely have sent each other audio files containing magnificent evolutions on their respective keyboards. Wrong code, try again. To make a long story short, Thollem and Riley exchanged, over a couple of sessions, a series of vocalizations exploring a myriad of facets related to pitch control (and, more often than not, out of control), disintegration of meaning, expressive logic of pure intuition, and – most importantly – improvisation completely devoid of egotistical and/or commercial purposes. These utterances – primal at times, elsewhere unspeakably complex – were woven and processed by McDonas on a Korg Wavestate, a machine of incredible possibilities when used by the right person. Once a satisfying outcome was achieved, Nels Cline‘s guitar was put at the service of the resulting patchworks as an additional source of colors.
The end product definitely sounds like an acousmatic composition rather than an impromptu hodgepodge, although an unpracticed mind might, at first, reel under the blows raining from the vocal multiplicity. As the minutes tick by, we find ourselves traversing ever-changing subcurrents. Voices – including expressions directly pertaining to the respiratory system – intertwine, merge and together melt, turning into a benign lava that allows the burgeoning of impressive sonic vegetation. Peculiar soliloquies do appear, but are quite infrequent. Cline’s unconventional overtones are the icing on the cake, a compound of skewed shards and electric lashings that lend the whole a distinctive fragrance of cleverness.
MASSIMO RICCI. TOUCHING EXTREMES. 