One night not long ago, lying in bed and listening to the September Collective's mesmerizing new album All the Birds Were Anarchists, the image of a snowglobe filled with swirling flecks of gold leaf flashed into my mind, at which point my mental camera slowly zoomed out to reveal the orb sitting on a shiny black grand piano, surrounded by velvet curtains even blacker than the lacquer on the Steinway. It was only one of a thousand such images I've enjoyed while listening to All the Birds over and over and over these past few months. Should you listen to the disc-- and I urge you to-- you will doubtlessly have wildly different visions, but I promise you that you will see something. It simply is that kind of record.
September Collective is the trio of Barbara Morgenstern, Stefan Schneider, and Paul Wirkus. If you know any of those names you'll have some idea of what to expect, as each artist's voice rings through true and clear. Morgenstern has recorded a number of releases, principally for Monika Enterprise and Leaf, featuring her pellucid voice and delicate arrangements of piano and synthesizer that convey a drifting pop sensibility, in the broadest possible sense. Stefan Schneider is best known as a member of To Rococo Rot and for his solo work as the ambient dub outfit Mapstation. And Paul Wirkus is an improvising laptop artist working with a library of chamber music samples and a small kit of analog synthesizers and effects. The group says that the project was born out of a shared 2002 tour in which each artist had solo billing. "After we played our sets we found it senseless to end up a concert just like this and we started to improvise in the end of our show," writes the group in its bio. "Although everyone of us works with loops and computers it worked out perfectly. So we continued after this tour and founded September Collective-- a project which is based on improvisation and trying out new things."
Their nonchalant, even naïve approach to group dynamics is all over All the Birds, but they're no dabblers: The album offers an engrossing and profoundly confident mélange of styles and timbres. Two levels predominate: one an improvisational scrim of shirred textures and intermittent sequining via brilliant sonic details, and the other a more robust structure of composed melody and songcraft. The two run parallel throughout the disc, swapping places and playing games, both within individual songs and throughout the album's entire arc.
The first track, "Out of Intention", opens with a whir of out-of-time loops: cardiac thuds, insect skitter, intermittent hi-hats, a dusky blue unfolding that might once have been a keyboard, or maybe a saxophone. A rudimentary bass line enters, shrugging its shoulders, and a delicate counterpoint blossoms in the piano's treble register. Far in the back, an unadorned drum machine keeps time-- with its MIDI cables apparently disconnected. (I love the way September Collective appropriates dance music's most basic tool to use pedestrian sounds in mercurial ways.) Against this nodding pulse, Morgenstern embroiders free, filigreed piano riffs that hang just this side of George Winston's property line before disappearing in the whir of Oval's hard drive. Beginning in the same shimmering approximation of key, "Das Meer" ("The Sea") muddles its loops into an arrhythmic whirlpool. An electronic sound like a bassoon, a higher muted reed line, and an almost imperceptible Rhodes fuse into an inseparable three-part structure that sounds uncannily like something from Talk Talk's Laughing Stock. Haphazardly brushed drums suggest that everything could fall apart at any second-- until that piano returns, almost certainly Morgenstern's, stitching everything lovingly back together. From chaos, pop-- and in a rush of hummingbird's wings and fingered stemware, it all dissolves back into ether again-- again, a whole lot like late period Talk Talk.
And that's just the record's first 10 minutes. "Natura", opening with looped and fizzed piano reverb, finds the players staking out their spaces in a three-cornered room, with what sounds like Morgenstern drifting into a melodic right-hand reverie, Schneider laying down dub-inspired sub-bass and melodica, and Wirkus doing his damnedest to untether his colleagues' steadfast mooring, letting a loop of close-miked piano clatter go flapping into the red. The same trick appears three tracks later, on "Pausenband", suggesting a box of ghosts hell-bent on breaking the locks, while the clacking percussion of "Our Cat" leads seamlessly into "Essentially Unchanged", where it plays out-- yes, essentially unchanged-- beneath limpid keyboards. Such recycled loops and recurring themes, far from suggesting meager hard-drive holdings, help not only to bind the record tightly together, but also to weave it into your very consciousness. I suspect that's one of the main reasons All the Birds has become one of my preferred bedtime listens of late. It's not simply that the record's palette is generally subdued and, well, mellow; but when the body is at rest and the brain slipping into hypnagogic drift, that's precisely when September Collective's quiet anarchy reassembles itself into such improbable, impossibly beautiful forms. Sometimes, it's better when music doesn't make sense, but like the iconography of dreams, simply runs free, making its own haphazard associations as it goes.
