Kim Myhr & Australian Art Orchestra: Vesper
Hubro

Any appreciation of Vesper has to start with its title, which means ‘evening' in classical Latin and reflects guitarist Kim Myhr's desire to create a ‘night piece,' something dreamlike that would capture the feeling of those moments at day's end when the pace slows and peacefulness settles in. To bring the near hour-long, three-part piece to fruition, Myhr collaborated with the Australian Art Orchestra, a septet led by Peter Knight, who's credited with trumpet, hammered dulcimer, and electronics on the recording. With Aviva Endean (clarinets, autoharp, umtshingo), Erkki Veltheim (viola), Lizzy Welsh (violin), Jacques Emery (double bass, autoharp), Joe Talia (Revox B77, electronics), and The Necks' Tony Buck (drums and percussion) also involved, the sonic potential of the ensemble is huge, especially when Talia uses his gear to re-process the others' sounds. Myhr himself contributes electric twelve-string guitar (with special tunings) and electronics to the performance.

One of the more interesting things about the project is that a piece so intimate in character was presented (and recorded) live at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival in June 2018, material so subdued not the typical kind of thing one encounters at a festival concert. The music isn't the only unusual thing, however, as the track titles also raise an eyebrow. The opening part's “I caught a glimpse of the sea through the leafy boughs of the pines” is from Dylan's book Chronicles Vol. 1, whereas the others—“We seemed to grow more and more pensive, but in fact we were less and less” and “No walls, no ceiling, no windows”—derive from books by Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue and A night of serious drinking, respectively.

While each movement holds up as a self-contained entity, Vesper is best experienced as a single long-form work. From the beginning, the music adheres to a contemplative unfolding, with Myhr's patterns reverberating alongside murmuring strings and muted trumpet. Offseting the somnambulation such a combination could induce are shimmering cymbal rolls and rumbling tom-toms by Buck. Tension incrementally builds as the movement advances and its sound world expands, the mass taking on a hallucinatory, haze-like quality. With the percussionist playing aggressively, Myhr amping up the tremolo, and electronic noises prominent, the middle movement proves more turbulent than the first; snatches of dissonance also enter in as the octet generates a thick slab of sound that at some moments flirts with chaos without ever splintering apart. The final part perpetuates the aggressiveness of the second, with Myhr's strums accompanied by a relentlessly churning swirl of strings and percussion, until decompression sets in to reestablish the sleepy ambiance with which the work began.

A melodic dimension is more alluded to in Vesper than overtly stated, the emphasis instead on textural mutation and moodsculpting. Patience on the listener's part is required to appreciate what Myhr's doing here, which could be seen as his take on Pauline Oliveros's 'Deep Listening' (characterized by her as “a practice that is intended to heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible”) as opposed to something rooted in established jazz performance. Regardless, one visualizes an audience held in thrall as it's engulfed by the collective's teeming mass of sound, an experience the home listener might come close to replicating by playing the recording at peak volume.

May 2020