When I first heard Colin Stetson's breakthrough LP-- a surprising thing for an experimental saxophonist to even have-- I pegged it to precursors such as Albert Ayler, John Zorn, and Ornette Coleman. The music was so animally energetic that it took me a while to realize how off-base this early impression had been. But while those free-jazz shamans embraced volatility, Stetson is much more aligned with minimalists like Philip Glass, which is to say that he restricts himself and knows exactly where he's going. Glass' longtime saxophonist Dickie Landry, whose excellently mellow 1977 album Fifteen Saxophones was reissued earlier this year, provides an intriguing precedent. Landry was a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble who played on Music in Twelve Parts, a piece whose edge-of-madness harmonic grind is in full force on Those Who Didn't Run. The title's whiff of courageous endurance gets more and more apt as Stetson pulverizes daisy-chained squalls for 10 minutes at a time, in two uncompromising arcs that exclude the airier respites of Judges.
Like Bryce Dessner and Glenn Kotche, Stetson adeptly straddles pop and the academy. And like Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs, a big part of his magnetism derives from a combination of unusual music and bold feats of physical daring. A one-man polyphony machine, Stetson sets his feet in a resonant room and wires himself up like a cyborg, with microphones on the walls, all through his bass sax, and on his throat. Pointedly ignoring decades' worth of looping and overdubbing technology, he blows the bejeezus out of arcane contrapuntal variations over and over again, with phantom sounds gathering around the deep pulse. The music seems weirdly sentient because only the continuous cycle of breath pumping through it keeps it alive.
You wonder why Stetson doesn't just turn blue and fall down, and how one instrument can make so many different noises at once. Circular breathing accounts for the former (Stetson must play a mean didge) while inventive mixing accounts for the latter. The clack of keys becomes an insistent rhythm track, microphone signals fry into ambient ozone, and ghost voices reverberate through the reed. Not only does this technique make brainy variations feel hot and haunted, but it gives us a fresh vantage on the saxophone itself. Though it plays a highly respectable role in jazz, the instrument takes on cheesier cultural baggage as you move outward, from marching bands to soft pop to Sergio. By enlarging the inner workings of the sax, Stetson demolishes clichés to unleash fresh, unexpected energies. It's like being inside an enormous brass tunnel full of windy byways and slamming valves, at once exhilarating and frightening.
Here, Stetson pits the low end versus the high; granular texture versus crystalline purity; deep, earthy groove versus high, watery shine. On the A-side, grungy riffs churn over a thumping substructure of bass and key action, and on the B-side, the bottom falls out and we're transported to a completely different world, one cleansed of heavy metal and drone-rock traces. Stetson's horn spirals through an upper-register series of intervals that seem to be trying to wrench themselves free of each other, and the disparity between prettiness and conflict is riveting. Though this EP plows a narrower row than Judges, Stetson still manages to show us two very different aspects of his visceral minimalism. The only downside for me is that his music really thrives on accumulation, which is to say that it thrives in longer formats. I suspect that this EP serves as a palate-cleanser for the final volume of the New History Warfare trilogy, clearly polarizing Stetson's impulses for incantatory force and eerie beauty before drawing them back into a complex whole.
