Most musical instruments are frozen in history, timeless in function but stuck in the contexts that surround their invention. Spurred on by this idea, saxophonist Daniel Thorne and his Immix Ensemble teamed up with Bristolian producer Sebastian Gainsborough (Vessel) to compose Transition. Transition is a four-movement suite, stylized as a conversation between concert-hall orchestration and left-field electronic production--something which in the last few years is a rapidly growing intersection. Each of the work’s four songs is supposed to highlight the historical snapshots of specific instruments (the trumpet, the saxophone, the oboe, etc) and how their contexts can be remixed or garbled with the presence of an electronic partner.
It’s not necessarily a groundbreaking concept. For last the decade, artists like Nils Frahm, Max Richter, or Daniel Wohl have been stretching the boundaries of the conversation between contemporary classical music and avant-garde composition that Thorne and Gainsborough are just entering. The piece is actually two years old, having been originally commissioned in the fall of 2014 for performances at Tate Britain and the University of Liverpool. The performances also stressed a collaboration between video art and orchestration, meaning it often feels like something substantial just listening to the album.
To its credit, Transition is an extremely breezy listen for a record of experimental classical music--running a little over 26 minutes, with only one song extending over eight minutes. The economy and pacing allows Thorne and Gainsborough to play with a wide range of elements without any feeling of excess or wasted space. Each of the four movements use their minutes wisely, allowing for more exploration than you’d think possible.
Starting with “What Hath God Wrought,” the artists decided to pair the bass clarinet and saxophone, the instruments whose sounds compliment and challenge each other the best across the entire album. There is something dancerly about the ways the two instruments weave around each other. Their faceoff is made interestingly discomfiting by a low drone that Vessel overlays on top of the action, something that very slowly takes over the song. His electronic touch is barely perceptible at first, but he sneakily washes out the sounds, making them feel older and less stable by generating a series of bleeps and fields of static that give the recording the character of an old radio broadcast. “What Hath God Wrought” gets more and more crowded, allowing the analog and electronic sources to crash into each other and becoming indistinguishable. It seems to make the argument very early on that these sounds can’t exactly coexist naturally, that they always generate friction by sharing the same space.
Following “What Hath God Wrought” is “De Revolutionibus” (“On Revolutions” in Latin), a movement that furthers the tension Transition wants to make very apparent. Of the four movements, it seems to be the most influenced by Vessel’s history of moody and industrial productions. It’s undeniably Gothic in mood, with violins screaming in the presence of electronic squeals and hisses. There are brief horrifying moments where it sounds like insects are crawling around the recording microphones. The instruments are artfully crumpled together, adding to the texture of a song that seems to draw inspiration from bumper-to-bumper traffic and free jazz. It’s the most interesting eight minutes of the entire album.
“Scope” was the only one of the songs not co-penned by Gainsborough, and as a Thorne-focused affair, it lacks the same tense conversation of the two pieces that preceded it. The electronics seem to disappear for nearly six minutes, and it makes for a conventional and wan listening experience. To make up it seems they packed the closer “Battle Cry” with all the violence its title suggests--transforming the conversation between the musicians into a full blown argument. Fittingly “Battle Cry” ends abruptly. The last squeaks of the trumpet cut the rope, and curtains fall down on Transition almost with no warning.
Overall Transition is never as probing as it can be. It doesn’t allow for total investment from a listener because the marriage of sounds is incomplete and fitful. The thought experiment that should be at the core of the album sometimes felt lost in a confusing morass of interjections and trip-ups. But there are enough moments of pure gold that peek its head out of the morass that make the experience worth it in the end.
