jump the circle, jump the line

Vocal music by Thomas Buckner
Electronic music and voice processing by Tom Hamilton

Review

THOMAS BUCKNER/TOM HAMILTON - JUMP THE CIRCLE, JUMP THE LINE (Mutable 17507-2)

Thomas Buckner: ”Thirty-five years ago when I began to explore solo and group improvisation, the idea was to make improvisations that sounded like compositions. I’ve evolved away from this idea gradually to the point where I want my improvisations, both solo and group, to sound (to be) unpredictable, to take me, my fellow improvisers and the audience to places we haven’t been before.”

Buckner further explains how each and every part of this music is developed independently of one another, and how the participants also worked independently all the way up to and through the cohesion in which they forged their ideas into simultaneity. The electronic processing of the vocals is developed by Tom Hamilton to ensure that no foreseen event ever takes place…

Tom Hamilton: ”…It is with great pleasure and some relief that I’ve returned (for a while) to making pieces that address essentially formal procedures. This performance uses techniques of analog electronic synthesis to structure, phrase and pace […] as well as to generate the actual sound material.”

The adventure of voice and electronics isn’t a new one - at all! Remember Stockhausen’s ”Gesang der Jünglinge” and Herbert Eimert’s ”Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama”, later joined by numerous, yes, innumerable, investigations into the voice in electronic settings and permutations. Yet, the matter is by no means closed, as that instrument - the voice - which is so close to us all, so utterly meaningful and physical, always reach new and altered expressions of the soul.

The music on this CD is indeed continuous, and the track points are provided for the convenience of the listener only. It opens on a solely electronic note; a stretch of bubbly, fast progressions, not unlike some of the galloping adventures of French madman and sound poet Henri Chopin or his colleague of electroacoustics at Studio Celia, Jean Schwarz.

The web of sounds widen as a voice - unintelligible - arrives and takes over much of the area, while other, demon-like sounds - as is from evil-hearted birds or ghastly shadowy creepy-crawlies out of our murkiest sub-conscious - circle the voice of probable human origin in a maze of audio, rising out of the spinning plastic in the laser-box.

It doesn’t take long for this sound world to reach the jungle, but it is a dream-state jungle with fairies, dragons and giant fern… You’re inside someone’s dream, or inside a flowing, swaying reminiscence of unknown ages, that hovers inside the meadow mist of late night landscapes.

This music is a peculiar mix of vocal and electronic sounds, drawing on old findings of Stockhausen as well as new inklings by Tom Hamilton and his apparatus of electric currents and binary solutions to artistic problems. I enjoy it immensely. The pure intensity of some of the passages reminds me a lot of Jean Schwarz and his high-voltage piece ”Quatre Saisons”, pushing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s texts to their limits! The vocals there were provided by the baritone Jorge Chaminé. Inside track 3 of ”jump the circle, jump the line” the electronic treatment of the voice of Thomas Buckner is almost identical to that of baritone Chaminé in the Schwarz work - probably without any such intentions from Hamilton; the effectiveness of the manipulations is reason enough to utilize them; the dream state it pulls you into, like a transparent membrane of time being lowered all around you, through which you sense long-gone occurrences and distant walks of life of distant souls. It’s eerie - but very tempting too…

Long stretches are made up of pure cave electronics, wherein the stalagmites and the stalactites reach for each other in a mineral darkness deep beneath the rock bottom… The voice that then occurs lends its vocal chords to the earth spirit itself, turning and twisting through massive layers of clay…

Sometimes rippling, pearly Buchla-like sounds, reminding me of The Silver Apples of the Moon of Morton Subotnick gush by in gleaming spirals.
On the whole, this music is enchanted, other-worldly, sub-merged and subterranean, physical in a fat clay-like sense and spiritual in a dark, demonic sense throughout; a bit scary, a bit dangerous, but, as stated before; tempting, like danger can be tempting up in the mountains on a stormy night.

An electronic mimicry of insect-life hisses and whispers past in the music, magnifying the elastic micro-worlds of unknown existences on the border of non-existence… like in “Chaos & the Emergent Mind of the Pond” by David Dunn… and it goes beyond that, into vibrating planes of subatomic jitter, inside the hypotheticalities of neutrino, passing un-altered through everything, leaving traces of passage inside the scientists’ subterranean water tanks…

Thomas Buckner’s vocal surge at times places me in a medieval Europe of the overflowing tables of Rabelais and the deep horror of the Black Death ravaging through the villages. Much of this sound world displays this medieval mix of lust and death, engulfing you in a sheer hurricane of sensuality and spirituality, of sexual pleasures and the smell of decaying corpses and the curving spaces under the domes of cathedrals. Mastery is at work in this sound art! - Ingvar Loco Nordin, SONOLOCO

Buckner, Thomas/Hamilton, Tom - Jump the Circle, Jump the Line

This duo has been working together since the early 1990s and has been documented before (on Tom Hamilton's CD Off-Hour Wait State, for example), but never as extensively as in this case. Jump the Circle, Jump the Line was recorded live on December 1st, 2000. Hamilton produces a wide array of synthesized electronic sounds and, to a lesser extent, processes Thomas Buckner's voice. The latter alternates between textural noise-making and deep sustained notes. The album is comprised of a single, continuous improvisation (indexes have been added for convenience, hence the track titles Segment A,2, Segment B,2 etc.). The singer gracefully leaves control of the stage to Hamilton, whose presence will be heard constantly from the first second to the last. Buckner lets him establish a pace before entering and often retreats to give him a chance to modify the path of the piece. As Buckner argues in the liner notes, this music was not about meeting the other halfway. Each improviser follows his own direction and ideas, with the difference that the singer does not have all of his freewill. Hamilton's processing, although light, occasionally sends him hiking on a different track. The electronic soundscapes can get very space-born, as in Segment E2 and in general sound better, more focused and less gimmicky than on Peter Zummo's Slybersonic Tromosome. Released only a few months after Buckner and Roscoe Mitchell's free improv date 8 O'Clock: Two Improvisations, this CD acts like a companion, completing the picture of the singer's activities at the turn of the century. -François Couture, All-Music Guide

THOMAS BUCKNER/TOM HAMILTON - JUMP THE CIRCLE, JUMP THE LINE

A brand-new release from Mutable Music (a label we are rapidly becoming acquainted with, due to the package of 3 CD's they just sent). On this disc, an exploration of vocal sounds & electronics takes place... & it's one you're not likely to soon forget. This is the kind of music that backs my dreams (& occasionally my nitemares) up! A totally different (but quality) musical adventure. Buckner's vox are fluid, not at all boring & challenging to listen to, especially in combo with the electronic wizardries that Hamilton pulls off. Though they have segmented the album in to "tracks", it appears (sonically) to be 59 or so minutes of pure fun for them! The real shifts seem to come with the electronics as they "move" into different shades on the palette... Buckner is right there on the changes, using his voice at one point as a thunderstorm to back up a particularly dark passage... or (almost) singing a lullaby when the instruments play little bell-like sounds that (may) take the listener all the way back to the nursery. For listeners unaccustomed to sounds that don't "fit the patterns", this WILL be strange... but if your ears are tired of the normal claptrap on the waves today - you will agree with me when I declare this to be HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Great stuff!

Rotcod Zzaj
Improvijazzation Nation # 54:

CD-REVIEW: THOMAS BUCKNER & TOM HAMILTON: "Jump The Circle, Jump The Line"

Cosy is not the way to describe this cd. It feels like you're wandering through a thick fog to encounter one horror scene after another. Alternating between spooky, thin and lonely or dark and mysterious, one can feel the presence of John Zorn's Painkiller. Although singer Thomas Buckner and electronics specialist Tom Hamilton trade in the brutality of Zorn for a very esthetical sound. So do not expect pumping beats or showy effects, but rather fine electronic sounds, floating freely in space and remaining interesting, without having to become merely spectacular. Hamilton prefers abstract sounds - somewhat reminding of Warp and Mille Plateaux releases - who are thrown in a permanently shifting game of transformation and changes of colour. When he does uses shades of melody, they tend towards the naïve Tigerbeat6 sound, without becoming cosy or nerdish. On the contrary: they add to the - sometimes horrid - astonishing mood. The subtle layers in which he combines the electronic possibilities gives way to an undercover rhythmical tension, perfectly completed by Thomas Buckner's voice. When he demonstrates his untransformed, mighty and gloomy sound, you can't help but sensing the atmosphere of a mysterious Russian opera. When Hamilton starts his live manipulations of the voice, the colours of this voice and the abstract electronics merge perfectly, without the voice losing its identity. So the joining of the human voice and electronics is all but a mere gimmick, rather a well-considered and successful combination, in which both components follow each other closely in the permanent musical evolutions. Endless looping is clearly not an option for this duo. Musically impressive and fascinating is this cd which will please fans of abstract electronics, but also those with a love for thriller and horror movies. Although they'll have to make up the images themselves. Those in search for spacey superficiality can let this one pass by.

Mutable
Electronic / avant-garde
****
KVM