This music requires patience, it’s something which demands all your attention. To listen to a small excerpt and then stop it, would give a false impression of the music. For me, this is a highly overlooked masterpiece which defies the conventions of the old school, the reductionists and perhaps every thinkable area or genre. This is truly punk, so to speak.
The opening track already tells you one thing: this is a remarkable drummer. The drumming is very original, the way of playing rhythm, the temperament, the choice of sounds. He proves that he has great chops with his stick playing, and then proceeds with almost completely abandoning this virtuosic style for the bigger part of the record. It’s almost as if he can predict every listener’s expectation and says fuck you to us all. I love it!
He then proceeds to play quite a lot in areas which I would call reductionism, but the way reductionism should have been. The carefulness and uptightness that we know so well from reductionsts of Germany, France and Switzerland is completely absent. What we hear is much more rough, harsh, almost trashy. The edges of his phrases are not cleanly cut. This is dirty reductionism. Having said that, you could almost feel that there’s a flirtation with noise music as well, but it’s much too fine and sensitive in terms of dynamics, timbre and form to be categorised as noise.
The drone-ish areas have such a captivating feeling, which I cannot explain. It’s as if there’s a kind of invisible groove behind the noise which makes it swing in an odd way. His temperament is also something quite unusual. There’s a sort of dryness to it, it doesn’t feel like he comes from a jazz tradition. Perhaps that’s why he’s so different from a drummer like Tony Oxley, even though they have so much in common. I get the feeling that he really is a mastermind, someone who understands things which most people can’t grasp, including me. The few moments when he returns to stick drumming, it’s so often cut off at the most unexpected time. One becomes unsure of the purpose of his actions, and yet it seems to make perfect sense in a kind of surrealistic way.
I believe this record could unify all kinds of listeners and practitioners of improvisation. It’s stimulating and challenging in so many different directions, and there’s no denying that this is a man who has an amazing sense of sound, dynamics, form, imagination… everything you could ask for.
It’s shocking to me that I could only find one review of this record (on Squid’s Ear). This is a huge achievement which should have been given more space in the public forum. I suspect (but I may be wrong), that even though Lytton has a legendary status, that he’s been given somewhat of an underdog position in this scene. I think he should be given much more opportunities to show the magnitude of what he can do, which is so apparent here.
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