New Album of Long Form Free Improvisation

One week from today Humbler Records will release non-dweller, an album of long form free improvisation performed by the trio of gabby fluke-mogul, Jacob Felix Heule, and Kanoko Nishi-Smith. Those that follow “bleeding edge” performances here in the Bay Area have probably encountered all three of these musicians in performance. Percussionist Heule has been improvising with Nishi-Smith, who has developed her own set of extended techniques for playing the koto, since 2007. Their duo extended to a trio when they were joined by violinist gabby fluke-mogul in 2019. non-dweller is the first recording of the trio’s inventive improvisations, and Bandcamp is currently processing pre-orders for both physical and digital distribution.

The album consists of two tracks, each approximately half an hour in duration. One can also experience that duration through a YouTube video of a performance presented as part of the Active Music Series in Oakland on October 8, 2019:

fluke-mogul, Nishi-Smith, and Heule performing at the Active Music Series (photograph courtesy of Jacob Felix Heule)

I have to say that, from a personal point of view, I find this video to be an informative resource. Since Nishi-Smith’s extended techniques include bowing her koto, in an “audio only” experience one is likely to have difficulty identifying which sonorities come from that koto and which from fluke-mogul’s violin. On the other hand, strictly from a listening point of view (so to speak), the interplay of that diversity of sonorities can be appreciated without knowing which of them were being contributed by which performers.

In my own experiences of listening to non-dweller, I found myself more interested in how the sonorities themselves unfold as a “conversation,” without worrying about whether that conversation actually reflects the “utterances” of the performers themselves. The other metaphor that may be operative for each of the two tracks on the album is that of a mural. Think of how many of the murals we are likely to encounter in the Mission have been the result of a group effort, the realization of a social experience, rather than a solitary one. In a similar way, the “whole” of each track emerges from how all three musicians contribute, sometimes taking the initiative and, at other times, adding to a region of that mural that had been previously created.

While I still have a strong preference for in-the-moment experiences of improvised performances, I have to confess that I have come away from non-dweller with new perspectives on the nature of such experiences.