Monumental project for the English jazz drummer Will Glaser: a double album that explores much of the musical avant-garde from the twentieth century to today, a sound mosaic where free-jazz, ambient-music, industrial, ethnic music and avant-rock fragment and merge to create new hypotheses and creative suggestions for a potential music of the future.
Presented in a refined package that includes two cassettes, one pink and one blue, with covers designed by Djoïna Amrani, “Music Of The Terrazoku: Ethnographic Recordings From An Imagined Future” is an ambitious but successful project, thanks also to the author's choice to involve talented musicians who become authentic protagonists – and not supporting actors – of the futuristic soundscapes created by Glaser.
Apocalyptic, leaden, yet eclectic and dynamic, Will Glaser's new album is similar to the monolith of “2001 A Space Odyssey”: the approach is deliberately exploratory, the instruments have primitive sonic connotations. Hums, metallic rhythms, dark post-devastation settings, natural sounds with threatening tones: all this happens in the first six minutes and forty-four seconds of “Then It Wasn't”.
What follows is a succession of sound images as strong as they are evanescent. In “Sunshower” electronic patterns form the backdrop to pulsating song-like bass notes (the always excellent Ruth Goller), Tara Cunningham's guitar (Modern Nature's latest acquisition) offers an earthly dimension to the gamelan-style geometries of “Illusion Of Abundance”, while Alex Bonney intercepts with his flute the percussion duel engineered by Jem Doulton (Thurston Moore Group) and Glaser in “Theft”. All this before the song announces the presence of man with Ed Dudley's cry in “There' Shit In The River” and finally with Lauren Kinsella's poetic declamation of verses set to Kirke Gross's violin chords in “Dedicated To All Living Beings Who Suffer”.
To frame this valuable sonic narration, Will Glaser inserts equally pregnant narrative connections (“Only The Rain”, “Only The Wind”), sowing the first seeds of a possible reinvention that arises from chaos (“Wrath”) and finds hope in nature (“When The Cloud Pass”, “Howl”. It is no coincidence that in much of the second part of the album the rhythm becomes more obsessive and pressing (“Bees”), bordering on electronic/industrial evolution (“Pylon”).
Logic and imagination go hand in hand in “Music Of The Terrazoku: Ethnographic Recordings From An Imagined Future”, a record that is decidedly not easy to process in a few listens, but unlike much contemporary experimental music, stimulating and rarely speculative.
02/12/2025
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
