Artist: Bleak House
Album: Dark Poetry
Genre: Experimental, Avant-Garde Jazz
Label: Creative Sources
Released: 2012
Quality: FLAC (tracks+.cue)
Tracklist:
- Entrances
- Bleak House
- Short Letter, Long Farewell
- This Is What We Heard
- Etude I
- Poem
- Graph
- This Is What We Played
- Tweak Peak
- So Low
- Jakta
- Trio for Morton Feldman
- Etude II
- For Sale - Baby Shoes, Never Worn
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- Personnel:
- Dag-Filip Roaldsnes - prepared piano
- Kim-Erik Pedersen - alto saxophone
- Tore Sandbakken - drums, percussion
This is certainly not the first attempt of rendering a narrative or thespian declension of the so-called musical indeterminacy, but the intrinsic heterogeneity, the wise literal references and the bizarre orchestrating techniques, which have been showed on "Dark Poetry" by the Norwegian free-improvising trio of prepared pianist Dag-Filip Roaldsnes, alto saxophonist Kim-Erik Pedersen, and percussionist Tore Sandbakken, makes it one of the most interesting attempt, which tries to follow such a direction along with many quotations and references. After the introduction of the three ideal narrating voices on "Entrances", they seems to offer a potential sonci translation of the notorious novel "Bleak house" by Charles Dickens on the homonymous track, whose constant creaks, tottering and groggy sonic structures and wobbly melodies manages to evoke the cutthroat and sadly realistic plot of the novel, which has still been considered one of the best indictment against law, lawyers, red tapes and nitpicking aspects of many civil jurisdictions, a shadow play for the filthiest side of human nature. The intense low-key broken melodies on "Short letter, long farewell" and their tacit sketchiness seem to evoke another moment of that novel. I mentioned Dickes' novel, but their sonic exploration could be perfect to set to music many other bleak houses from other arts: I could remind the house described by Shirley Jackson on "The Haunting of Hill House" or the imagined houses where characters portrayed by Schiele could live into. Their music sometimes sound deliberately a sort of mirroring of impossible geometries, weird-looking corners, crooked rooms, cramped cells, even when they seek for similar structures in the organic world ("Tweak peak", "Jakla"), within sonic ("So low", "Graph", "Etude I", "Etude II") and literary ("For sale: Baby shoes, never worn", quotation of the known flash fiction by Hemingway). The dedication to Morton Feldman's "Trio" on "Trio for Morton Feldman" cannot be but dutiful to one possible source for inspiration of "Dark Poetry", even if an attentive listening could remind techniques and sketches from John Cage, or Henry Cowell.