Many adventurous listeners express a strange aversion to so-called extended techniques—a forgivable bias. Where Asian classical traditions integrate such techniques seamlessly into conventional musical discourse, a great deal of Western music drops in these alternate colours like trite parlour magic rather than offering them as a viable expressive resource. French-Norwegian improv quartet Dans Les Arbres has developed a singular and evocative approach doing precisely the latter. On their fourth album, Volatil, listeners are drawn into their organic musicality rather than distracted by the novelty of who’s doing what and how, or the extent to which the ideas are spontaneous or premeditated. Precious few of their utterances are produced conventionally, yet even though it’s sculpted from abstract sound there’s an almost familiar quality to the way that these elements are assembled. The group establishes matrices of short, intertwined iterative phrases that provide a gently percolating foundation from which the music can evolve. Sometimes said departures are a simple deviation in perspective, or a more sectional change of scenery. On other occasions these shifts are utterly cataclysmic, making the disc’s foreboding title apt.
The astounding lucidity of these ebbs and flows is undoubtedly a product of the quartet’s personnel. Xavier Charles (clarinet), Christian Wallumrød (prepared piano), Ingar Zach (percussion) and Ivar Grydeland (guitar) each have their own fascinating and eclectic discographies, and the sum of their experiences nourishes the shared make-believe world this project inhabits.
Few outfits manage to behave like a pastoral landscape painting one moment and evoke explosive symphonic drama the next, all the while maintaining an idiosyncratic palette of distant warbles, elusive susurrations, and dimly lit clangour. It’s just the sort of elegant, potent, and decidedly gimmick-less music-making that could very well win over those aforementioned skeptics of textural improvisation.
Nick Storring is a Toronto-based composer, musician, and writer, and a contributing editor to Musicworks. His music has been presented and performed by the Esprit Orchestra, Eve Egoyan, Quatuor Bozzini, Beijing’s Musicacoustica Festival, and Vancouver New Music. An avid collaborator, Storring has composed for films by Terrance Odette, Ingrid Veninger and, in collaboration with Dafydd Hughes, for the National Film Board’s award-winning Web documentary High Rise: Universe Within (2015), directed by Katerina Cizek. He’s also scored productions by Litmus Theatre and MT Space, worked with celebrated choreographers Yvonne Ng, Marie Josée Chartier, Brandy Leary, and Deepti Gupta, and created music for “ambient gaming environment” Tentacle, which was mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2011. Storring’s writing has appeared in Exclaim!, The Wire, and AUX.tv. He also contributed liner notes to Alga Marghen’s reissue of the ’60s band Intersystems’ entire recorded output, as well as RVNG Intl.’s box of early psych trio Syrinx’s reissues and previously unreleased material Tumblers from the Vault.