Duo Improvisation On and Around Bass Drum

from the Bandcamp Web page for the recording of the composition being discussed

One week from today Notice Recordings will release the first duo album to bring together percussionists Kevin Corcoran and Jacob Felix Heule. The title of the album is Erosion, described as “a sprawling yet focused love affair with the bass drum, allowing myriad objects to playfully interact with its grand form.” The recording is being released through Bandcamp through either a limited edition cassette, which will be available for shipping on or around May 30, or digital download. For those pre-ordering the digital album, one track will be made available immediately after purchase, followed by the complete album after release on May 31.

The digital option is not a bad deal, considering that Erosion consists of only two tracks, both about 40 minutes in duration. The titles of those tracks are “eskers” and “intertidal;” and the performers describe how they came to be in the following statement:

A day a month for a year we met in an east bay studio to improvise for hours. Mirror image of horizontal bass drums. A selection of cymbals and objects. Textural sound at a glacial pace. Collaboration stemming from shared percussive interests. This duo, which isn't quite a band yet isn't unknown improvisation yet isn't only a skill share workshop, emerged. Grateful to Notice Recordings for taking these sounds beyond the boundaries of our own four ears.

I think it would be fair to say that the last sentence of that statement owes as much to the two performers as it does to Notice Recordings. The two tracks were recorded in Berkeley on different dates. “intertidal” was captured on December 18, 2019, followed by “eskers,” committed to recording on February 12, 2020, less than a month before the lockdown due to COVID-19 was imposed. Thus, the album itself can be taken as a reminder of the state of affairs to which we are just beginning to return.

The Bandcamp Web page for this album includes the following statement of how that aforementioned description of how the performers worked resulted in these two 40-minute tracks:

Erosion finds the two merging their techniques in a very palpable, sensuous way. As if rendering an amorphous sculpture in minuscule gestures: gathering, releasing, reapplying material in a structured improvisation; new patterns emerge yet resist completion, as if working with weighted feathers which are impossible to manage.

One can easily appreciate both these techniques and that “glacial pace” while listening to both of the tracks. However, I feel it is important to note that both of the quotations refer more to physical activities than to the sounds that emerge through those activities. As a result, I must confess personally that I would have preferred a video document to one limited to audio. To the extent that this is music that arises through precisely-considered activities, there would probably be much to be gained from observing what those activities were, rather than just listening to the resulting by-products.

Some readers may recall that, at the beginning of the month, I wrote about the performance by the Nathan Clevenger Trio for Karl Evangelista’s Unsolitary II streamed video of improvised music. The video account of drummer Jordan Glenn’s contributions to this set definitely enhanced the experience of listening to the trio as a whole. One might say that one listens with more than just the ears. What one sees often refines the process of listening, particularly when the sounds are as exploratory as those elicited by Corcoran and Heule. Now that we are emerging from lockdown, perhaps this duo can provide another performance through video, rather than working within the limitations of audio.