Cover design of the album being discussed (from its Bandcamp Web page)
INSECT LIFE is a debut album for a collective band whose members are Raffi Garabedian (tenor saxophone), Ben Goldberg (clarinet), Danny Lubin-Laden (trombone), Ben Davis (cello), Gerald Cleaver (drums), and Zachary James Watkins (loops, processing, and sythesis). It was released this past November 7. As of this writing, its Bandcamp Web page accounts for the fact that only four of the CDs in the Limited Edition Digipack of 100 are still available. Fortunately, there is also a Digital Album release, which includes unlimited streaming through an app provided by Bandcamp, as well as downloads in MP3 and FLAC formats.
The album was produced by Zachary James Watkins, who also provides synthesized content consisting of sixteen tracks identified as “Scenes.” The fifth, eight, fourteenth, and last of those tracks are remixes of preceding content. Taken as a whole, this makes for an overall “evolutionary” performance. To be fair, however, I suspect that grasping that evolutionary process will probably require repeated listening to the entire recording. The number of repetitions required of the attentive listener must be left to the listener’s own capacities for awareness!
The sources for those Scenes emerged from weekly collaborative sessions hosted by clarinetist Ben Goldberg. In addition to Garabedian and Watkins, the participants in those sessions were trombonist Danny Lubin-Laden, Ben Davis on cello, and drummer Gerald Cleaver. This clearly not music for the casual listener. One must allow for the individual tracks to etch themselves into memory. Without that prerequisite, even the most attentive listener is unlikely to grasp the content going into the remix tracks.
Personally, I like the idea of an album in which only some of the tracks involve spontaneous improvisation. Those tracks then serve as the “building blocks” for the remix tracks. To be fair, I am still trying to get my own head around the overall “journey” through the album. This is likely to require more multiple listenings than I have yet encountered. Fortunately, I can be patient in these matters. If I can let each of the tracks grow on me in its own way, then I suspect that eventually I shall be able to grasp the overall growth leading to the final (sixteenth) track!
