Mattering and Meaning, composer/pianist
Dan Nicholl's debut album for WeJazz, offers a startlingly intimate, spontaneously re-imagined approach to his instrument of choice, the acoustic piano. While his instrument is firmly at the center of these nine short compositions, it is often manipulated and extended by focused applications of loops, abstract ambient electronics, field recordings, and sound effects.
Nicholls further distorted the piano's "natural" voice by recording it entirely on an iPhone 6S™. His considerable academic training in jazz and improv, classical and experimental musics all come into play. Further, he is a founding member of
Loop Collective, and has worked extensively with
Squarepusher and
Goldie. In 2013, he issued the stellar Ruins long-player (on Loop) with sidemen
Shabaka Hutchings and
Kit Downes; it was one of the first volleys on Britain's musically and stylistically expansive integrational jazz scene. He also plays in saxophonist Otis Sandsjö's band and works with
Downes in Oli Steidle's wildly experimental electro-avant ensemble the Killing Popes.
Opener "Papa" employs an inverted stride piano pattern as a rhythmic base as he explores the instrument's middle register with a series of deliberately pattered notes played above ambient sounds, a looped spoken voice saying "alright," and air pockets of subtle distortion pointing toward empty spaces on the margins. "Yeh-Yeh"'s piano melody is refracted against looped, distorted chord voicings, an irregular pulse, and layers of warm, watery reverb. Its singular melodic phrase appears, syncopates, and alters its sequence and reemerges altered. In "Fermentation" alien sounds push through indefinable sonic atmospheres that warp the piano's sound signature as it moves headlong into loopy textural extensions and tonal contractions signifying the collapse of form and function. Throughout,
Nicholls' applications in layering, stretching, and collaging treat the piano not as a solo instrument, but as a central textural element lacking an established system or process. This is especially effective in the dreamy title track that owes a debt to the late
Jon Hassell's fourth world system; a single two-note pattern is looped and syncopated against gauzy pillows of sound. That technique is extrapolated upon in "These Hills Hold You," wherein the piano offers distilled, single-note patterns played seemingly intermittently while disguised under layers of primitive, gently applied electronics. The stride piano notion reemerges in "Keep Doing Positive Things" offering cascading layers of rhythmic patterns (à la
Blue Gene Tyranny) amid field recorded voices of children, sweeping analog synth sounds, and the canned voice of cultural theorist Donna Haraway. While the music on
Mattering and Meaning is dreamy and soothing across the board, it all but erases the lines between improvisation and composition, rendering them as inseparable from one another and the listener's experience. Disorientation and the indefinable are, in these nine interconnected pieces, part and parcel of the creation process itself, offering an encounter with a vocabulary that, while otherworldly and alien, is humanly attractive and warmly accessible. ~ Thom Jurek