David Torn's “Prezens” is a collision of the
organic and the synthetic, of technology and physicality. His first recording
for ECM since the watershed “Cloud About Mercury” of 20 years ago, it features
the guitarist, producer and film composer with three of New
York City's more fearless
improvising musicians -- alto saxophonist Tim Berne, keyboardist Craig Taborn
and drummer Tom Rainey, long-time cohorts of each other. In early spring 2005,
they gathered in a studio in the Hudson
River Valley to
record a dozen hours of collective improvisation, drawing on several years of
experience playing live together in Manhattan and Brooklyn clubs, as well as at festivals in Canada and Europe.
Yet “Prezens” is no documentary record, with Torn having "magicked"
the tapes -- remixing, reshaping, recomposing the music after its performance to
create discrete collages of power and beauty, by turns ambient and volatile.
Much as a work of fiction can sometimes reveal more about an event than mere
journalistic reportage, “Prezens” offers another point of view on the facts of
the band in the room.
"The full band tracks are what we actually played together; even as I
reshaped the material, I respected the special way the band works and sounds.
But it isn't what we heard straight from playback. It's the skewed way I heard
the music as it went down, alternate avenues included -- how it might've been
if we had played something longer or shorter or if we had turned a different
corner. The first piece, ‘Ak’ is a performance -- we played the heavy-metal
part in there, but we didn't play it long enough. So, I made a loop out of it,
did a few overdubs, then the loop goes back to the original performance. Other
times, it's a matter of tweaking the mix to make it more asymmetrical, where
one instrument is in high fidelity, but everything else is lo-fi. Then, there's
a track like ‘Them buried standing.' That's me pulling Tom's drums out of a
performance, then building something totally new around them."
David
Torn guitars, live-sampling and manipulation
Tim
Berne alto saxophone
Craig
Taborn Fender Rhodes, hammond b3, mellotron, bent circuits
Tom
Rainey drums
Matt
Chamberlain drums
ak
rest & unrest
structural functions of prezens
bulbs
them buried standing
sink
neck-deep in the harrow...
ever more other
ring for endless travel
miss place, the mist...
transmit regardless
Recorded March 2005
ECM 1877
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