In a recent radio interview, Ollie Bown, the resident electronic musician of Australian improvisers Tangents, said that the band has been trying to learn to leave more space in the music. Each of the quintet’s members—on guitar, drums, cello, keyboards and mallets, and electronics, respectively—is capable of kicking up quite a racket, and in their music, listening to each other is paramount. Judging from Stateless, their ears are as finely tuned as their chops. It’s a lovely album—porous, dynamic, lively, shot through with silence and bathed in warm light. It’s sometimes cluttered, but never distractingly so; like a cozy apartment strewn with curious objects, it’s just busy enough to keep you stimulated, your attention thrown pleasantly off balance.
Stateless marks a shift in the band’s method: while the group’s debut, I, was recorded live in the studio, the new album is the product of jams that were chopped up, remixed, and extensively processed on computers. As a result, it’s a hybrid beast, with one foot in the improv world and the other in electronic music, and it strikes the perfect balance between group interaction and digital production, and between groove and texture, repetition and abstraction.
Evan Dorrian’s drums drive the group’s sound. He likes the sound of sticks on rims, tapped cymbals, and other small, scratchy gestures, which he arranges into bursts and clusters and pin-prick constellations. Sometimes his playing is multi-tracked or run through effects, but rarely in a way that calls attention to itself. Guitarist Shoeb Ahmad alternates between reverberant background washes and potent droplets of tone, and cellist Peter Hollo frequently treats his instrument more like an upright bass, plucking instead of bowing.
Adrian Lim-Klumpes, a member of Triosk, rotates between piano, Rhodes, vibraphone, and marimba, and he often supplies the music’s tonal center. His watery vibes gives “Jindabyne” a hint of Tortoise, and his limpid piano chords run like a cool stream through the tangled brambles of “Masist Cau”; toward the end of “N-Mission,” a bass-driven tune recalling Four Tet, Lim-Klumpes unfurls a rolling, surging solo reminiscent of the introduction to Prince’s “Condition of the Heart.”
With the exception of “Directrix,” a brief free-improv freakout that lurches like a rock tumbler stuffed with steel wool and metal shards, Tangents develop their pieces patiently and almost imperceptibly. The way the hardscrabble “Masist Cau” builds, you keep expecting it to kick into overdrive—but at the same time, lulled into a state of deferred expectation, you forget you’re waiting for anything at all. It’s a curious feeling. “Along the Forest Floor” forgoes percussion, tossed like lazy ocean swells by cello and reversed vibraphone; it’s the rare track on Stateless where a lyric impulse comes to the fore. But even when there’s no melody to speak of, Tangents can be plenty expressive: “Oberon,” swirling like the inside of a snow globe, evokes a sense of peace that’s the opposite of its wild kinetic energy.
Tangents are obvious disciples of the Necks, another improvising group from Australia: Like the latter band, they emphasize tone and texture above melody, privileging small, incidental sounds over big declarative ones, and they favor hypnotic patterns that pulse and twitch like perpetual-motion machines. And while nothing on Stateless has the sustained mood of Necks’ hour-long pieces, Tangents’ keen sense of focus leaves no doubt that they’re in it for the long haul; “Jindabyne” cycles patiently for seven minutes and could easily run longer; the flickering “Oberon,” 13 minutes long, has even more potential to just keep going forever, powered by the energy stored in its quick, snapping rhythms, its path greased by cellist Hollo’s fluid, energetic lines. Tangents’ impulses tug them toward the margins, even as their combined force pushes them ever onward. It makes following in their wake the most captivating kind of journey.
