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Frédéric D. Oberland / Grégory Dargent / Tony Elieh / Wassim Halal, “SIHR” (Sub Rosa, 2024)

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This unique quartet unusually originated as a collaboration between two French photographers, as Frédéric D. Oberland and Grégory Dargent performed some improvised duo concerts a few years back to accompany screenings and exhibits in Cairo, Beirut, and elsewhere. The duo was then expanded into a quartet to include Lebanese bassist Tony Elieh and darbuka player Wassim Halal and a three-day “improvised sound bacchanalia” ensued. The foursome describe themselves as a “post-anything quartet featuring multi-instrumentalists from the Mediterranean inland Sea” and share an ambitious vision of “new folklore for a devastated planet” and “tangos danced on the glowing ashes of our days.” In less colorfully poetic terms, SIHR is a visceral and freewheeling collision of Arabic percussion, snatches of Middle Eastern melodies, timeless folk instrumentation, and ambitiously weird/mangled/abused synth sounds. In fact, literally everyone other than Halal plays a synth of some kind, which makes for a deeply strange collision of traditional music and outré electronics. While SIHR only fully transcends its improvisatory roots on the more melodic and sax-driven “YouGotALight,” the album as a whole is an oft-fascinating outlier and this quartet truly never resembles any other improv ensemble that I have encountered.

The opening “Oui-Ja’aa” is a fairly representative plunge into this foursome’s bizarre collision of disparate aesthetics, as Halal’s clattering percussion builds into a hypnotic groove while a maniacally insistent synth figure wanders and trills all over the place. It eventually becomes a bit more melodic in the second half, but the endlessly propulsive and shapeshifting groove is the highlight by a landslide, as it sounds like it could be a live recording of Can on a particular great and adventurous night. Aside from that, “Oui-Ja’aa” also sounds at times like Catherine Christer Hennix has just ridden a war elephant into a Middle Eastern street fair. The following “Enuma Ellis” cools things down a bit, however, resembling something between a strain of droning oud-driven desert rock and a ritualistic street procession gnawed by pulsing swells of howling distorted electric guitar (Oberland’s handiwork, I imagine). “YouGotALight” then further reduces the intensity to a sublime simmer, as Oberland’s alto sax sensuously weaves a melody across a subdued landscape of quivering and rippling minor key arpeggios, dubwise percussion, melodic bass, and spasms of electric guitar. The final minute is especially wonderful, as a melodic crescendo unexpectedly drifts in. Frankly, it sounds like the best song that Barn Owl never recorded.

While “YouGotALight” is my favorite piece on the album, most of the other highlights fall on the album’s second half. For example, “OhmShlag (Quake Tango)” feels like a darkly lysergic mirage of a serpentine industrial assembly line in a foreboding desert landscape, while “Babel Cedex” offers a different strain of mechanized desert nightmare that also sounds like a howling and frenetic krautrock outro. If I am not in the right mood, “Babel Cedex” can feel like a bit of an indulgent cacophony, as the bassist, percussionist, and sax player are all playing at go-for-broke intensity by the end, but they admittedly whip up quite a bracingly visceral and gnarled freak-out nonetheless. The following “Black Powder” is similarly outré, but considerably more understated and melodic. It almost sounds like it is being steered in three different directions at once, as the guitars have an arty laptop-ravaged Pita/Fennesz feel, but they are joined by a dub-wise post-punk bass line and clattering eruptions of free drumming, yet the broken, stammering groove somehow works anyway (to my ears, it evokes a mosaic slowly falling off a wall piece by piece). Naturally, the closing piece is no less bizarre, as Elieh’s insistent “locked groove” bass pattern anchors a chaos of stuttering industrial sounds, laser noises, clattering drums, and animalistic howls as a simple, unhurried guitar melody languorously unfolds.

My main caveat with SIHR is that the unrelenting dramatic intensity can be a bit much, which is an issue that I have had with some of Oberland’s other work as well, but that is merely a fundamental difference in our temperament (I am generally quite drama-averse in my taste). My other caveat is similarly subjective, as I cannot help but wonder how different this album would have been if these four musicians had had more than three days to figure out how to weave together their divergent individual sensibilities. It is easy to imagine that a more melodic and groove-centered album might have resulted, but that does not necessarily mean that it would have been a better one. There is definitely something to be said for the daredevil spontaneity of throwing four adventurous musicians together without allowing them adequate time to find a shared common ground or sand down clashing idiosyncrasies. I don’t think anyone involved knew where this album was headed and that genuinely seems to have worked in the quartet’s favor, as SIHR is as raw, explosive, and unpredictable as a howl of anguish. While I would definitely stop short of calling anything on this album a tango, SIHRdoes genuinely have the cathartic feel of an end-times death dance in a post-apocalyptic wasteland as flaming birds drop from the sky (and I sincerely doubt that any other album released this year will be able to plausibly make such a claim).

Listen here.

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Jean C. Roché, “Birds of Venezuela” (Sub Rosa, 2019)

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This unusual reissue quietly entered the world last December when everyone was frantically obsessing over the year-end lists and features, so it did not get nearly the attention it deserved. It is certainly an odd release for a couple of reasons, but the most obvious one is that a 35-year-old album of bird songs was resurrected by a record label best known for avant-garde and experimental music. The other is that Birds of Venezuela was just one of over one hundred albums recorded and released by French ornithologist Jean-Claude Roché. 

That naturally begged the questions “What makes this album the special one?” and “Who exactly is this for?” As it turns out, the liner notes by David Toop answer the former and the album itself decisively answered the latter: this album is for me because it is amazing. In fact, Toop actually started planning a trip to the Amazon soon after hearing this Birds of Venezuela and I probably would have done the same, as a strong case could be made that the most texturally and melodically compelling music scene of the mid-’70s was the Venezuelan rain forests.

Given that this is an album of field recordings of birds, it is no surprise that the birds themselves are the stars. Among the many participants, the pootoo portrayed on the album’s cover is the biggest draw of all, as the liner notes breathlessly describe it as “a metal-looking bird” that is “one of the sonorous curiosities of this mad nature.” Toop himself encountered the pootoo’s song on his own Venezuelan trip and described it as “like lost ghost-souls crying out to the living” and one of the “most affecting” listening experiences of his life.

With source material like that, Birds of Venezuela certainly would have been a fitfully striking release as just a collection of pure field recordings, but it is actually elevated to a higher plane of art and vision by Roché’s unusual collage approach to mixing. Unlike many bird-based albums, Roché’s intention was not to document and isolate the individual songs. Rather, he ambitiously attempted to create a vivid and vibrantly alive “stereo concert” that roughly replicated the experience of being inside the delightful cacophony that erupted every dusk and dawn in Venezuelan forests.

Amusingly, Roché unintentionally became an actual avant-garde artist a few years later, as the Lyon-based GMVL started presenting evening events where they would play five of Roché’s stereo concerts at once in a park. Depending on one’s location in the park, it was possible to experience a blurring together of sounds from various continents all at once. Jazz musicians soon began approaching Roché to tell him that they liked his work. I expect most ornithologists do not experience that level of fame in art scenes.

Each of the five pieces assembled here has its own distinct character and subtly surprisingly trajectory. For example, the opening “Ocumare” initially sounds exactly like what I would expect from an album of Venezuelan bird songs, then unexpectedly erupts into a bubbling and hallucinatory crescendo with the help of a chorus of frogs. In “Gran Saba,” one especially singular bird call that I recognized from a Dead Can Dance album stands out, but the depth and the warbling, seesawing dynamics of the backdrop are perhaps even more compelling (until it is all enveloped by the sinister roar of howler monkeys, anyway).

The shorter “Rancho Grande” revisits that immersive, multilayered sound field of chittering, gibbering, and chirping sans monkeys, acting as a palette-cleanser of sorts before than album’s bizarre and memorable second half. As a composition, the lengthy “Palmar” is arguably the album’s zenith, as it undergoes a mesmerizing and surreal transformation that strikingly feels industrial or futuristic at times.

Naturally, Roché saves the pootoos’ appearance for last, as their haunting call sneakily creeps up through the otherwise happy chirping and gurgling of “Guanare/Barinas.” Toop’s description of the sound as “ghost-souls” is a fairly apt one, as the pootoo’s call does have an eerily human sound, albeit one that sounds smeared and processed. To my ears, it is not necessarily more attention-grabbing than the album’s previous frog eruptions, but it is deliciously unnerving in its context. It feels like Roché presents a lively, colorful, and playful swirl of sounds, then stealthily pulls back a curtain to reveal the darker and more disturbing reality that also exists in the Amazonian rain forests.

One element of truly great music that I am always chasing is a masterful feat of illusion that erases any overt traces of deliberate compositional arc, recognizable instrumentation, rigid chord structure, or the hand of the artist. I did not expect to find such a perfect example of that achievement here, as I have heard plenty of bird-song albums before and I have never been particularly dazzled by them. Roché’s stereo concerts, however, elevate a chorus of isolated pretty sounds into a trilling, chirping symphony of genuine depth and textural genius.

Many years ago, I got to experience a Francisco López piece that was essentially processed rain forest sounds played with maniacal intensity and crushing volume. Unsurprisingly, it was an amazing and overwhelming experience. Birds of Venezuela is every bit as compelling as that, albeit a far more subdued variation: “birds as ambient soundscape” rather than “birds as noise assault.”

As a pure musical experience, this album is a virtuosic masterclass in dynamics and layering, as there a vibrant mélange of constant movements, shifting distances, loop-like rhythms, and melodic unpredictability pervading all these pieces. I know nothing about bird and frog psychology, so I have no idea how much the individual participants on this album consciously interact with other species sound-wise. They all seem to have a very important role that complements the roles of others though: Birds of Venezuela is like hearing a vast improv ensemble operating on a hive-mind level and it feels both effortless and transcendent.

Samples can be found here.