Liner notes for the album
Confined Movement by Tomaž Grom and Axel Dörner
Within the context of free improvised music, a
duo is always a meeting, a collision with the other - the other being partially
unknown and unpredictable - therefore simultaneously combining risk and
responsibility. Despite the bold pattern of a communal sound flow and harmony,
this collision is embodied and constantly realized within the music. The duo’s
common space isn’t confined to sound, it also includes the interweaving of
individual histories, modes of expression, thinking, ideo-logies, cultural
backgrounds, and aesthetic preferences as well as the social and symbolic
status en-joyed by the co-musicians. Of course, in a more formal sense, it also
relates to the acoustic charac-teristics of the musical or sound instruments,
their technical limitations and advantages as well as the their creative
approaches and principles. Within the context of the concert, all of these
enter into a space defined by dispersed lines of force, with its stage and
audience, the acoustic characteristics of the space, and the amplification and
recording technologies that capture it, as here in the example of this present
album. In this meeting, there are always remains, something that is left out
from the collision, the gaps in the sound and silence, a fragile field of the
predictable and unpredictable, a silent potentiality which underlines the
emerging music and is embodied in the moment of creation before being
transformed by the recording. This may be the field of “confined movement” from
the album’s title, a space which is limited but not completely so, allowing it
to widen and deepen due to its partially porous state.
Here, the Slovenian contrabass player, Tomaž
Grom and German brass player Axel Dörner, present the results of their first
ever concert meetings which took place in May 2019 in Slovenia (Klub Šta-la)
and Italy (Dobialab). Every improvising musician is originates as a solo player,
with their own sound, techniques, background and sensibility, pushed into the
concept of “being alone” before joining the field of “being together”. The
field of free improvisation is in a state of constant flux, slippery, divided
between individualism and collectivism, between singular and plural. Throughout
their musical careers, Dörner and Grom have developed their own recognizable,
idiosyncratic style, their individual playing techniques and principles
regarding the expansion of acoustics, as well as the dissemination and
decomposition of the sound potential through electronics, leaving an imprint on
stage and on sound mediums. No expression of sound emerges in a vacuum, even
though it’s personal, it integrates into a wider field of different sound and
musical histories as well as expres-sions, joining a line of predecessors and
contemporaries. Nor does it appear from nowhere, even less so, instead it
carries all their personal history and pedigree with it as it enters the
collision field, that is the meeting. Sound expression within free improvised
music is a form of personification; the personal sound becomes a persona, a
first and last name, a person who becomes almost the only carrier of that sound
each person almost becoming synonymous with the players. When transferred into
the field of a duo, it can be heard as a unique assembly in which the puzzle
pieces are already known, recognizable expressions forming a common sound
entity, however due to its fragile nature of “being together” within a given
moment, that instant of sound, this expression constantly inter-venes into the
field of its own dissolution and restoration. A duo has a much more ingenious
dy-namic than just the idealized embodiment of “being together”. This “being
together” is always in harmony with “being alone”, constantly integrated into a
shifting and subtle hierarchy of inferiority and superiority. These dynamics
and relationships reveal themselves as much on the sound level as on the silent
level, which encircles the entire situation, defining it and creating
hierarchies within the common sound, and simultaneously its component part,
although silent. This is affected by the social and symbolic backgrounds,
personal characters, organizational principles, production meth-ods, conditions
and support systems, the musicians’ status on the local and international
scenes, the generational differences, esthetic preferences, as well as the
market value and “in demand” factor. Within free improvisation, the principle
of an individual in a group actually drives the fact that your status within a
certain scene or market is not just determined by your own expression but also
by that of your musical partner, by the other. Here, we are once again in a
collision, a field of “con-fined movement” which can spread and deepen only
through sound, as in the recording on this pre-sent album. It is in itself
already a selection, confined in comparison to the original event, already
shaped by the taste and sounds heard by
the two musicians. Tomaž Grom and Axel Dörner expand those limitations; the
present album is the first ever recording of a duo with contrabass in Dörner’s
rich opus, this time partially enriched with an expanded electronic sound. This
deepening doesn’t just unfold in the field between the collision and harmony of
two sound expressions, divided be-tween noise and tone, silence and sound, nor
solely in the rhythm partitions and the colour of sound, the repetitions and
patient deepening in the texture, but above all in the movement of both, between
the textural, modulated tonality and progression within the sound dynamic. In
this movement, the duo creates a space that allows the possibility of “being
together”.
Luka T. Zagoričnik
Translated from Slovenian Mirella Habr
