“I see my voice almost like an extension of the clarinet and saxophone. I’ve written songs at the piano my whole life, but it’s something I’ve always kept hidden because I felt it wasn’t allowed! I felt conflicted between the music I would play and what was actually coming out when I was writing, but lately I’ve been trying to keep songs in their raw, nucleus form – taking that leap of faith and being a bit more vulnerable.” (Faye MacCalman, Interview on NARC. Magazine Online)
I’m late, as usual: I discovered the second studio work of the London-based band Archipelago, titled Echoes to the Sky, only this year, while in fact it was released on the New Jazz & Improvised Music Recordings label in June 2021 (and recorded in December of 2020), following the publication of Weightless, their debut work, dated 2017. Archipelago is a London trio consisting of Faye MacCalman (clarinet, tenor sax, synthesizers and voice), John Pope (bass and double bass) and Christian Alderson (drums and percussion): the artistic path of the band is dedicated to a profound deconstruction and contamination of jazz with psychedelia, post-rock and vague electronic flavours. The multiplicity of contaminations that the band had already shown with the first studio work is further expanded in this second episode: the vocation to cross between different musical genres pushed the trio to insert MacCalman’s songwriting and voice into their compositions. MacCalman has always been interested in forcing the limits that we often impose on the so-called song-form (Faye’s music is focused around pushing the boundaries of song forms, genres and improvisation by combining these musical worlds freely and experimenting with the kinds of emotion and honesty they can express together, as we read here): she has in fact recently started experimenting with songwriting and with her own voice, and therefore the choice to include this new instrument within the trio’s palette must have been completely natural.
It is therefore not surprising that MacCalman’s voice immediately marks this new direction by guiding the trip of Waiting, the opening track on the record: supported by the very tight rhythm work of Pope and Alderson, MacCalman traces a small symphony of psychedelic jazz in the shape of a tidal wave crashing into the seashore, resulting in a scattered collection of smoky and almost post-apocalyptic sounds, leaded by the band leader saxophone. Gold begins as a wonderful duet between Pope‘s bass and MacCalman‘s clarinet, delicately punctuated by Alderson‘s minimal interventions on cymbals, using rimshots that allow the rhythm to grow calmly; Pope goes on a series of small solo digressions that introduce the central section of the piece, dominated by the bass (clean and distorted, and always accompanied by the synths played by MacCalman), then leading to a concluding section again entrusted to a meditative and fascinating tenor sax solo, a prelude to the reprise of the initial theme. Wake Up features again the voice of MacCalman over a filtered bassline: the sound is wide, varied, between acid jazz and some reminiscence of a pop-alt-rock (with inspirations coming from the 60’s), and the saxophone draws languid jazz atmospheres. MacCalman‘s songwriting is tenderly enveloping, but Wake Up is much more than this: within this track, the trio pushes the song-form towards a complete deconstruction through a series of instrumental passages that literally put the sound material on fire, opening it all kind of contaminations and experiments up to the edge of noise, and accompanying the piece towards a delicate equilibrium between pure sound and silence before returning to a more regular structure in the finale. The elegy of Wine Dark Sea emerges as from a deep distance, an oceanic remoteness: MacCalman dominates the soundscape with her saxophone, gently relaxing on a suffused background provided by bass and drums. Wine Dark Sea is a game of timbres and sound textures, a shady crescendo that has the trend of a wave: now it touches the shore, now it withdraws, timidly, ready to return and crashing down on the rocks; an episode of intense melodic research, based on a precise ostinato, a figuration repeated almost up to the end, when the rhythm breaks loose and open up to a new, dazzling digression. Dark Wine Sea goes off on the resumption of the initial theme, leaving room for the nervous, very short instrumental passage of Undercurrent: the song sounds like claustrophobia, featuring the obsessive rhythms of distorted bass and drums and a synth line very close to noise. The Wine Dark Sea–Undercurrent combo shows in a plastic way the trio’s ability to cross temptations and inspirations even very far from each other, creating a composite sound universe absolutely free from the idea of “genre” (precisely because it is capable of cross them all). Chemical is an unexpected exchange between the jazzy delicacy of MacCalman‘s saxophone and a rhythmic background that vaguely echoes prog before undergoing sudden, almost punk-like surges: Pope‘s bass can sway convincingly between pure groove and phrasing in a profitable counterpoint with the winds, which however remain the undisputed protagonists. In Silhouette a nervous clarinet outlines a fragmented melody on a sulphurous background of synths and drum strokes: an acid and urban nocturnal, which still borders almost noisily, creating a peculiar sensation of suspension. The epidermal tension of Silhouette is a prelude to the singing of Burn On, which dissolves the tension accumulated during the previous episodes in a very slow and inspired ballad: the crystalline vocal melody sung by MacCalman guides through a crescendo that accompanies the track to extinguish itself in a small ocean of electronic noises through a chaotic accumulation of phrasing from the clarinet and bass, supported by Alderson‘s rhythmic nervousness.
Oscillating between the songwriting of Faye MacCalman and the attitude of a power-trio dedicated to a daring, contaminated, experimental jazz with clear psychedelic shades, the trio MacCalman/Pope/Alderson produces a small musical miracle whose true strength lies, as well as in the incredible instrumental and compositional quality, especially in MacCalman‘s courageous vocal performances. Her beautiful voice emerges in all its strength and fragility across the tracklist: like every voice whose power has just been discovered, even that of MacCalman shines with its own light for her frankness and ability (and courage) to accept and expose her fragility. In the end, MacCalman‘s cantato is like a precious crystal, delicately inlaid and fragile as if on the point of breaking: like her solo interventions on the saxophone and clarinet, an instrument among the instruments and an authentic vehicle of emotion. Alongside the discovery of the strength of this new instrument, accompanied by an intimate and fascinating songwriting, there is the sound of the trio that literally creates the space, sculpting it: on several occasions during the listening, we face the creation of new forms, a music that continuously builds itself into the space or, indeed, from which the space itself seems in some way to spring up in its turn. “Shape shifting sound”, as defined elsewhere: and in fact the shapes, the contours, everything seems material yet at the same time elusive in these eight tracks, as if it were caught in a flow that constantly reshapes it. The result are eight songs whose rendering is sparkling, as many visions of possible worlds, in which the levity of folk songwriting, the harshness and psychedelic digressions, the rhythmic decomposition of the prog, and some sort of mysterious richness meet (and collide with) electronics and a lot, a lot of jazz; improvisation is everywhere on the record, at a very high level, but most of all the jazz character of these compositions comes from the sound that is now round and soft, almost liquid, and now dry and uneven of the tenor sax and clarinet played by MacCalman. There is a reason why jazz music is still today the most lively, vital and contemporary music that exists, and Echoes to the Sky clearly testifies this small (but great) truth: of course, if you (like me) intend jazz as re-inventing, re-writing, re-starting, with an attitude of total openness to contamination, to experimentation and to pure and simple beauty. The trio led by MacCalman succeeds in the enterprise of merging the most disparate inspirations in a changeable yet magically defined form, typical of this trio and no other: MacCalman, Pope and Alderson bring into the cauldron of the only cultured music of our time an attitude and an expressiveness that overflow into rock (Thinking of how to use what we have in a way that’s not obvious has become something which we as a band have become really conscious of. I think it’s something that’s grown from this collection of material especially: How do we make this thing rock without being ‘rock?’ How do we make something that’s intense, but also really quiet?, as Pope himself wonders in the same interview cited at the beginning of this review), fearlessly facing the unknown, in search of the Sound and the Wonder. Listening to Echoes to the Sky makes me think, above all, of a marvelous manifesto, a demonstration of strength, vitality and maturity of a wonderful band and of a whole way of thinking (re-thinking?) music.