From Squarepusher to Reich: Swiss Post-Jazz Trio Plaistow
Johann Bourquenez, Vincent Ruiz and Cyril Bondi
A group whose members take it for granted that each individual operates on an equal creative level, Plaistow – who took their name, which is that of a district of London, from a track on a Squarepusher LP – are among the most compelling of the many piano trios to have sprung up in the wake of Brad Mehldau, Esbjörn Svensson and the Necks[/. More than 300 concerts on tour in Europe, Russia, Japan and India have allowed them to develop an authentic and even stubborn individuality, using inspiration from many sources but focusing all their influences (including certain elements of jazz and minimalism) down to a clearly defined identity, one that is, in Duke Ellington’s phrase, beyond category.
In these live performances they explore new dimensions of four pieces from Titan, their previous album, whose 14 tracks were inspired by and named after the moons of Saturn. Carefully calibrated but with no shortage of human emotion, the compositions range from the pulsating dynamism of “Hyperion” to the patient understatement of “Helene”, whose typically luminous ending sums up their gift for drama and surprise. This is a great time for piano trios, but there really isn’t another one quite like Plaistow.
Comments
THE CROW
- "Its taken almost three years from the founding of the band to releasing the first long play album. Three years and a great many concerts, rehearsals experiments really and always with the axiomatic will to listen, to give, share and receive attention. On these bases, themes were formed, melodies and returning motifs, written six-handed. Pieces that ended up forming solid compositions, and thats what the crow is really all about."
Bandcamp.
Lacrimosa
- "These three young musicians of French and Swiss origin play a music style which is hard to define. Thinking one is listening to jazz, the music suddenly mutates into semi-electro. One just managed to filter out a melody when it disintegrates into coarse, metalic splitters. Rock on the one side, on the other minimalism
Very nice find, BN. Thank you.
'
ETA: gooogle translate says "Recycled Criminals In Bus Drivers" . . . Hmmm ?
Released 06 November 2012
music by Plaistow, texts by Arm
Johann Bourquenez, piano
Vincent Ruiz, doublebass
Cyril Bondi, drums
Arm, voice
recorded by Renaud Millet-Lacombe at Studio de la Fonderie, Fribourg (CH), august 2012
mixed by Renaud Millet-Lacombe at Hush Sound Studio, Geneva
masterized by Philippe Teissier Du Cros, Paris
- "The world turns. The pendulum swings. Night gives way to day. Good stuff comes out of bad situations. Good situations turn sour and cynical. There may be something in our brains, or maybe there is just something out there in the real that makes us think in terms of oppositions, cycles, balances, pairs, light and dark twins. This is what we call dualist thinking. There is a God and there is a Devil. There is matter and there is spirit. Another version of dualist thinking is more obviously tailor-made for orthodoxy. For musical dogmatists, the kind of people who only listen to one kind of stuff and dismiss the rest, there is a jazz and there is not-jazz, or heavy metal and soggy rubbish, or pure folk and hopelessly compromised commercial music. For those who regard cultural dogma with suspicion, these distinctions dont seem to matter.
Someone asked me the other day what Plaistows music was. Im not usually lost for a word but I had to pass on this one. Jazz is very much at the heart of it, and with Citadelle jazz has come through with a new and growing authority, but there are other things going on as well, procedures that come from electronica (even if the specific sounds do not), from the neo-tonality of contemporary classical music (whether the guys consciously listen to these composers or not) and from a huge reservoir of central European vernaculars, where the musical cultures of East and West collide on a daily basis, on the radio, on television commercials, on piped music in bars, on ringtones.
The very best thing about fast food (apart from creating spaces where you can both taste and hear all that crazy syncretistic stuff going on) is that it has also, inevitably, spawned a slow food movement. The very best thing about Easy Listening is that adds a new and different value to not-so-easy listening. Plaistow play not-so-easy music. The harmonies on Citadelle are not Bill Evans harmonies. The bass lead on Chicago is more reminiscent of the Paul Bley group of the early 70s, with Kent Carter, and there is an angularity to the piano playing that points away from Evanss lonely romanticism. Johann Bourquenez says he thought Lacrimosa, the groups previous album, was the first to be conceived without too much randomness. Its an interesting choice of word and slightly enigmatic. He will put his own construction on it, but for me this is a record that is very much more than a collection of tracks. It has direction, trajectory, what the philosophers call intentionality. It seems to be going somewhere and somewhere definite.
Randomness is the heat-death that awaits free music performed without absolute concentration and fellow-feeling. Machine-tooled predictability is the fate that awaits music played with too much control. Like The Necks, who they somewhat resemble, Plaistow always manage to create a music whose repetitions and (algo)rhythmic structures generate surprise rather than ennui. Who would have expected Dub Step from them? What a consummately clever appropriation of a genre whose usual procedures are a million miles from piano trio jazz!
Theres no obvious narrative to this music. It has the abstract beauty of that glorious, ambiguous swirl on the cover, which might be a chrysanthemum or the trace of some mysterious fractal from the microscopic world, or might be feather. I wondered if EOTW referred to End of the World, in which case that piece has a quietly reassuring quality. It suggests that the post-apocalyptic might not be so scary after all, just a quiet throb of rays and dying echos. And at the end of the process ce quil reste a dire what is there left to say? Simply that this is among the most exciting groups around just now, a unit that can comfortably work with a rapper (and just as comfortably decide that the outcome, while fascinating, doesnt belong here except as a ghost track), or incorporate dubstep, or a sequence that might hint at Olivier Messiaen (and it isnt on Oiseau, either), and that has the confidence to realise that sudden, dramatic stylistic change is more often a sign of creative insecurity than of creative abandon. Plaistow evolves. Its music evolves. Your hearing of it will evolve, from record to record, from track to track, from moment to moment within a tracks. A citadel is a fortress within a city, a place of safety for the citizenry. Plaistow are not defending a position, though. They are merely content, for the moment, to work within the strong walls of harmony, mass, slowly accreting rhythm. Here more than ever, they make Plaistow music."
- Brian Morton, april 2013
(album out on Two Gentlemen Records, april 12th)
- http://www.plaistow.cc/
- Well worth the effort replacing them - me thinks . . . .
Mobydick & Plaistow - Tariel EP
Released: April 2009
Mobydick: rap (fran
Plaistow - Titan
Plaistow - 'Cube', live at Band on the Wall
releases February 7, 2017
Johann Bourquenez - Aurorae Chaos