Swiss band Sonar announces Tranceportation (Volume 1), their
fifth studio album and the second by them to feature American avant-guitarist
legend, David Torn.
"Had MC Escher made music instead of drawing impossible
and perplexing perspectives, it would sound like Sonar" is how writer Sid
Smith once assessed the Swiss-based band's work.
It remains an apt description for the outfit's method of
creating hypnotic pieces by gradually building intricate patterns of picked
notes, plucked harmonics, mesmeric bass, and insistent rhythms.
The music created by Stephan Thelen (tritone guitar),
Bernhard Wagner (tritone guitar), Christian Kuntner (tritone bass), Manuel
Pasquinelli (drums, percussion) harnesses elements of rock, jazz and
contemporary classical minimalism and fuses them to create a distinctive
musical language.
Their partnership with David Torn began with their 2018
release, Vortex. Initially brought in as producer, such was Torn's enthusiasm
for the quartet's music he couldn't help but add his flowing brand of effusive,
vivid soloing and textural layering across the breadth of the record. While
that was a spontaneous, off-the-cuff reaction to music that had been composed
for a quartet, for Tranceportation the music has been specifically composed
with Torn in mind from the very beginning.
Bringing a renowned and adventurous musicality to everything
he does, Torn's reputation as a 'wild card' instrumentalist has seen him work
with an impressively wide array of diverse artists that includes David Bowie,
Laurie Anderson, Bill Bruford, David Sylvian, Tori Amos, Mick Karn, Madonna,
Jeff Beck and Jan Garbarek among others.
With parts written and arranged for a new quintet formation
of Sonar there's a greater integration of space for improvisation and deeper
sonic exploration built into the music.
Sonar's principal composer, Stephan Thelen, says of Torn,
"David is somebody I have known all my life through his music and whom I
really admire for his work. So to get him over to work with us in Switzerland
first as a producer and then as a player was really exciting." Torn's
fluid improvisations over Sonar's tight clusters of sound added yet more depth
to their work.
Recorded in Bellmund, Switzerland during a marathon five-day
session that yielded over 80 minutes worth of material, they have chosen to
release the first half of those sessions as Tranceportation (Volume 1) in
November 2019 with Volume 2 scheduled for release in May 2020.
Thelen, who in addition to his work for Sonar has previously
been commissioned to write for the acclaimed Kronos Quartet, explains how the
music of Tranceportation works. "The seven new pieces which make up the
two volumes of Tranceportation are all based on harmonically remarkably simple
patterns that only consist of a few notes and that are, in one form or another,
repeated throughout the whole piece, which is clearly where the 'trance'
element comes in. However, using rhythmical techniques like isorhythms,
polyrhythms and odd time signatures, these seemingly simple patterns actually
subtly create complex rhythms and twisted sonic illusions."
Likening this aspect of his work to the conceptual puzzles
embedded within MC Escher's paintings, Thelen explains that the repetitions
don't appear immediately obvious. "So, even if you only hear a few notes,
it sometimes takes a very long time until the overall pattern is in fact
repeated."
While the conceptual and structural underpinning of
Tranceportation's music is vital, so too are the impassioned performances that
resonate at the heart of the four tracks that make up Volume 1. Riding alongside
the metronomic certainties of the sonic architecture, surges of dialogue and
discursive ideas are vented and examined as the tension within the music builds
and creative sparks fly.
At its heart, the compositions and performances on
Tranceportation invites listeners to step away from the mundane and enter into
the transformative space that Sonar and David Torn create. They say every
journey begins with a step. This journey begins with your ears.
TRACKS
1. Labyrinth (14:26)
2. Partitions (5:37)
3. Red Sky (11:14)
4. Tunnel Drive (7:42)
Volume 2 is scheduled for release in May 2020.
