Monday 12 December 2016

George Lewis & Splitter Orchester - Creative Construction Set™


Occasionally an album comes along, the depths of which I can tell from the first few minutes will probably take me a lifetime to fathom -  Creative Construction Set is such an album...such an album...

Where to begin? How about the fact that I've spent the last couple of hours painting...not the walls, but the paper designed for painting images onto, any images, abstract, representational, figurative...you know, art things. Which tells you nothing about this album...although it does, in a way, because it tells you that by mentioning my act of painting I don't know how to begin to describe Creative Construction Set...so how about a comparison between sound and images? Maybe. This is abstract art of the highest degree. Perhaps I even paint in a similar fashion to the way the Orchester and George Lewis make music...improvisational...no fixed idea of what will emerge but...an approach in mind, in place, the bare bones or foundation of what will take shape...

George Lewis has been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, in case you were wondering. Now you know. Knowing nothing of the artists is no bad thing...no preconceptions. That knowledge didn't prepare me for this album. Not much can...

Amid the multi-instrumental fragmentary (pointillist?) sonic marks Lewis' trombone will intermittently rise up, leviathan-like...to ride, or cut through, a sea of bowed, plucked, snatched, blown, tapped instruments...sometimes a clatter in unison, brief punctuation...breaks in which the brass throws a mournful blanket over/under everything...the crackle of static, a stylus stuck...fluttering breath through a trumpet? scraping toward climactic crescendos then nanosecond silence, tape delay, loop, computer clicks, bubbles, squeaks, little wooshes, piano chords, miniscule melodic runs, brushes on drums...

If the underlying tone is somewhat mournful, the tapestry of sounds constantly crackle with life, sometimes joining to form dense matter during what feels like free falling through time and space, each star emitting points of light to form a cosmic display which, as I suggested at the start, cannot be comprehended in a single trip. A stunning album. 



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