Aaron Lumley is a string bassist who recently moved to Montreal after some years of activity in the Toronto improvising community. Wilderness presents eight highly organic solo improvisations. In an accompanying note, Lumley compares his approach to wandering off a forest path for the chance to encounter moments of sudden and unexpected beauty. There’s a sense of testing ground here, usually without any sense of haste but with keen attention to the inner messages of sound, playing and listening for certain harmonic inferences and rhythmic possibilities. Lumley tries different ways to get sonic messages, whether it’s the vigorously drummed chords of “Woodwose” or the rapid pizzicato of “Rain Makes the River Rise,” with the accompanying clatter of strings slapping against the fingerboard. “Coyotes Proclaim Her Arrival” is a strongly linear bowed piece that nonetheless will cede its forward momentum to a repeating figure, a sudden turn to sustained bowing on a single note to raise harmonics from the vibrating string, or strumming. In contrast, “Two Matches Left,” which begins as a brief plucked figure ending in a buzzing note, is repeatedly tested until it begins to yield increasingly fluid lines. Lumley’s journey into sound is compelling, and results in music shaped less by impulse than by the suggestions inherent in the bass’s physical properties.
Stuart Broomer has written extensively on music, mostly improvised, for both general and specialist publications, and his liner essays have appeared on CDs by musicians from some 20 countries. The author of Time and Anthony Braxton (Mercury, 2009), he is currently writing a fantasia on the life of Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips. He has been intermittently active as an improvising musician since 1965; his composition Found Theme for the Age of Reason appeared in Musicworks 112. He lives in Toronto.