With its focus on listening instead of seeing, music is the ideal art form to ponder over the concept of time, its perception and the importance of the subjective experience. Often lacking the panting impatience of the visual abundance that surrounds us, music is one of those areas where you can fold back on yourself as you try to give meaning to a succession of sounds and impressions. This is specifically applicable to improvised music; you could argue that reflecting on the nature of time is at its very core.
The freedom of, and refusal to set a course in advance of improvised music is the ideal means to investigate the malleability of time, both for the musician and the listener. The improviser creates shapes, enters a dialogue, maintains a web of connections, starting from baggage and experiences accumulated in the past, producing it in real time with the goal of reaching a meaningful result. The listener is invited to join in as a witness, but unavoidably becomes a participant, processing sounds, but also time, in a subjective way.
We have all experienced it: realising the performance you just witnessed was twice as long as you thought it was (the reverse if you are out of luck). Music has the capacity to manipulate your temporal awareness. Perhaps that is why so many albums of improvised music carry titles that reference time, the moment and memory. In this particular case, it is not a reference to the illustrious London jazz club, but to W.G. Sebald’s modern classic Austerlitz (2001), in which the protagonist is on a quest to reclaim his lost memories and, consequently, his identity.
The four improvisations that make up The Vortex Of Past Time constitute a whirling mass of sound. Often turbulent and non-conventional, but with a remarkable concord. There is a 31-year age gap between drummer Andrew Cheetham and reed player Alan Wilkinson, but it hardly matters, as these artists, who have only appeared together once before on a release (a tape with guitarist David Birchall released by Tombed Visions in 2018), keep friction, tension and focus in a striking balance. Music lacks the means to show detailed, literal stories like novels or painting, but that might also be its biggest strength.
The listener stays independent and can interpret musical input as they see fit. And there is an abundance of material displayed here, as Cheetham and Wilkinson combine impressive technical prowess, dynamics and imagination into a whole that combines physicality with thoughtfulness, tumult with intimacy. Like all music, their interaction is abstract and as such it basically expresses nothing, or nothing tangible anyway, yet it never ceases to impress and surprise. A musical performance remains the ideal way to deal with the impermanence of everything, and this album makes an excellent case.
Guy Peters 2019
