Liner notes for the album
The Ear is The Shadow Of The Eye, by Tomaž Grom and Zlatko Kaučič
At the turn of the millennium, at
a time when my ears were sailing deeper into free improvised music, there were
only two musicians in Slovenia who were distinctly committed to it: drummer and
percussionist Zlatko Kaučič, who trained as a musician abroad where he joined
numerous musicians and scenes; and younger contrabass player Tomaž Grom, who paved his own way with rare occasional
supporters. Their meeting was inevitable, taking place almost 25 years ago in
the form of a short tour as part of a trio in which they were joined by the
guitarist Igor
Bezget. Until today, Grom and Kaučič have only
occasionally played together, including once as a duo at the Mariboring
festival in 2010. It would be nine years before the two played together again,
at the home of Zlatko Kaučič in Goriška
Brda, where the recordings of this present album were made. This work was
created in an essentially different environment than the one which existed in
the beginning of the new millenium, when I started immersing myself more deeply
into their music. The Slovenian music scene in the field of free improvised
music is blossoming. Numerous protagonists are active at home and abroad,
already enjoying their own international success stories, opening up new
spaces, creating concert series, festivals, publishing houses and devising new
working methods in this fragile artistic organism, divided between
self-initiative and self-organisation as well as the co-dependance on
institutions and different co-financing mechanisms. Kaučič and Grom are
strongly involved in the international scene, while staying active at home. If
anything, as a writer on the subject of music and occasional collaborator, it
is due to their creative work on the scene that I have become even more aware
of, not only the required involvement in the development of this scene, but the
necessity of a healthy and strong local environment that international players
can join and in which they can create connections and new opportunities. In
this context, the improvisor also becomes the organiser, promotor, publisher
and creator of a new space which can then be occupied by others who enrich it
and increase its ability to be seen and heard. This is the basic condition
which later allows the development of different approaches, aesthetic tensions
and in short, their antagonisms within every scene. Their path, which condenses
in sound form on the following album, is in this space full of convergences and
divergences that are embodied in their own way in the present music. Kaučič is cosmopolitan, but committed to the fringes whereas
Grom works in the centre, but is drawn to the fringes. The first formed his
strong initial connections abroad, where he immigrated to as a youngster,
whereas Grom formed them at home. They each created their own concert series
and opened up new concert spaces, later founding the main international
festival of improvised music in Slovenia, as well as their own publishing
houses and associations through which they publish their own works and support
others. Kaučič has already educated
four generations of younger musicians through his school, while Grom has
offered them a creative platform in the form of a workshop titled
Research,
reflection. They also co-iniciated two international improvisational
orchestras,
Kaučič Orchestra without borders / Orchestra senza confini and
Grom Šalter Ensemble, but most
importantly, they have co-created mechanisms and strategies through their work
and involvement that enable free improvised music to have a place in the wider
Slovenian cultural landscape. Both players realise that
this position is not self-evident and can quickly change, despite different
working methods and aesthetic bases. In his creative work, Kaučič is much more
committed to the heritage of jazz and various free jazz styles, although he
includes string quartets, choirs, operetta singing,
songs and poems, while Grom is into the more modern branches of free
improvisation, which originate from his experience in the sonic environments of
modern electronics, electroacoustics and experimental music as well as past “reductionisms”,
bringing them face to face with modern dance, poetry, performance and the field
of audiovisual arts. This is revealed through each of their collaborations; Kaučič with Evan Parker, Agusti
Fernandez, Joelle Leandre, Peter Brötzmann, Steve Lacy, etc, and Grom with Seijiro Murayama, Michel Doneda, Jonas Kocher, Axel Dörner, Tao G. Vrhovec
Sambolec, Martin Küchen, Radu Malfatti, etc. These are also lines of force which spill into
the music on this album, strongly resulting from their creative restlessness
and perpetual exploration of sound. The latter has led Kaučič to floor drums,
percussion sets, numerous everyday objects and electric zither, through which he
can partly step away from the percussions sensibility, as for Grom it led him
to use electronics and the dissection of sound in the space. The album is
appropriately titled
The ear is the shadow of the eye. The music is
extremely physical, gesticulative and visual in some way, while firmly anchored
in the acoustics and their shades, as well as the tranquillity and focused
listening. It all exquisitely pours into an intense and uniform sound entity of
convergences and divergences, which spread, condense and dilute, come together
and move apart in a common sonic space, in a game of sounds and their
dissections, noise, pulses and rhythming, constantly moving between them. After
more than 20 years of meetings and separations, concentrated into this
in-between space of convergences and divergences, the resulting music is not
what I would have expected, despite knowing them both. In this concentration
lies their music “here and now”, which apparently had to happen after so many years.
Luka T. Zagoričnik
Translated form Slovenian by Mirella Habr