The Brooklyn Rail

Free improvisation need not descend from the common tradition of jazz, or free jazz. Perhaps it’s pointless to untangle suspected lineages. Perhaps the two-decades-old All Ears festival isn’t dedicated to fully free improvisation anyway. One aspect of this weekender that’s certain is that it’s permitted to sidestep the inclusion of many of the expected elder players who customarily inhabit this scene. All Ears offers some fresh slants on the nature of improvisation, concentrating on small groups, or even duos and soloists. We could name some of the performers’ roots as classical, folk and electronic, if pressed. This may well be due to the preferences of new artistic directors Anja Lauvdal and Natali Abrahamsen Garner, doubtless differently slanted to those of the original founders Maja Ratkje, Lasse Marhaug and Paal Nilssen-Love.

This is the festival’s third year at the recently re-housed Munch Museum (opened in October 2021), which stands formidably on the edge of the inner Oslofjord, in the city’s newer building development. Its core Edvard Munch exhibition is highly impressive, becoming better as palettes darken and subjects grow deeper into misery and isolation. At the time of this festival, there was also another exhibition that successfully linked Munch with his sibling of doom and social observation, Francisco de Goya. The museum’s cozy performance theatre has side-walls covered with wooden panels that look like curled paper, with heavy curtains sweeping across the full lengths at showtime.

The International Nothing are a clarinet duo of absolute oneness. Dwelling in Berlin, Kai Fagaschinski and Michael Thieke resolve to unite their horns in a tonal resonance that isn’t either comfortable or antagonistic. There is something exceedingly attractive about their joined lines, but nothing is overly unified to the point of becoming neutered. Their pieces sound composed, but presumably have much leeway, in the jazz fashion, even though they sound more like chamber experimentalists. They’re presenting Just None Of Those Things, which has been amassing its structure for over two years. It seems as if this is a progressing work, almost like a suite that keeps getting longer. Clarinets are literally twinned. The combined resonances sometimes trouble the ears on a technical, interior level, but your scribe still doesn’t want earplugs. Low-breathing sounds enmesh, each player alternating in dominance. It’s akin to a seance in its harrowing focus.

Another duo comes from Estonia, unavoidably suggesting a folk background given their instrumental selection of torupill (bagpipes) and kannel (zither). Paul Dunmall, from England, is the most noted bagpipe improviser, while the kannel has surely only rarely appeared in this field. Katariin Raska and Anna-Liisa Eller adopt contrasting approaches, but still fit together naturally. Raska blows her pipes in the traditional manner, but avoids the sound of folk, pursuing an abstract shape. Eller actually avoids even playing her instrument’s fully chromatic strings directly, for most of the time, concentrating on tiny implements, often working around the wooden edges, attaching clips, or brushing, scraping (with thin sticks stuck into the frame’s perimeter, then sprung to vibrate) and otherwise coaxing out unexpected results. The bagpiping is the most minimal we’ve ever heard, and it’s a good change to hear spaces between the droning multi-phonics. There’s a koto-esque bendiness to the string-strums, as finger-stopped pipe-tubes emit game-call quacks on the pipes. The kannel is subjected to endless foreplay, but the strings are more directly plucked and stroked towards the set’s end. A most unusual improvisation.

All Ears is not scared of radical volume contrast, with several instances of uppity electronics being chased by some of the softest acoustic caresses. Glupsk huddle at a small table, their laptops side-by-side, their headphones bulging, all sitting down at their glows, as if in an internet café, facing their public but lost in their screens and wire-tangles and mixing consoles. The sound jumps magnificently around a multi-speaker set-up that feels bigger than four in number, the panoramic sonics possibly being thrown like a ventriloquist’s patter. From Reykjavik, these three geeks create music that seems to grow out of academic electro-acoustics initially, before heating up into a club-dance judder, à la Autechre. One of the members is also producing a live drawing, projected on black drapes to the rear, an excreted spidery construction that keeps adding modules, well-paired with the ongoing aural eruptions and jitterings. Bass quakes and treble scrunches in a constant cascade. Once again surprising structures evolve and another open arena for spontaneity is re-shaped.

Damsel Elysium indulges in much layering of operatically inclined voice and shaped, sampled atmospheres, moving from piano to bowed-drone upright bass, and acting more like a performance artist than a pop musician. Another pianist, Caledonia, joins midway, making romantic flourishes, and freeing Elysium to tinker with effects pedals and laptop. Opera returns, and this is not so much looping as abstract accumulation, although there is the sense that these London players are well aware of how their construction might develop, rather than actually improvising intuitively.

The Canadian sonic/visual artist Myriam Bleau suffers from following Glupsk, and also topping off the second night. She uses a large table to spin small tops, illuminated when they’re touched, with each device triggering sound. This can be quite limiting, as there are only a few beat-boom, voice sample or electro-swoop possibilities available, and the music ends up sounding like very basic house/electronica. There is minimal control, the main hands-on power being to alter the speed of each spin. Bleau also manages to incorporate dance moves at the same time, which does add extra interest between her top-twisting manipulations. It’s more of a circus act than a gig, ultimately, something that’s interesting to dabble with for a short while. Remove the visuals and the sonics would be very basic. Again, the audience has to question how much of this content was improvised, not that there was much happening during the set anyway.

All Ears shines when probing less likely paths into improvisation, offering up some very surprising strategies, but of course, with such chance-taking there can be some room for disappointment, some of the time. In its defense, All Ears is not titled as a “free improvisation” festival, but only as a “festival for improvised music,” which opens up entire vistas of personal interpretation.