Colin Stetson - The Sax Acrobat

The American musician, in truth, is chasing a pure beauty that transcends conventional musical languages and aims straight for the gut, stirring unexplored, ancestral emotions that have lain dormant beneath a blanket of coherent but superfluous music, defying at the same time the constant reliance on effects favored by loop e sampler many virtuosos of contemporary music.
Soft and austere, New History Wayfare Vol 3 : Too See More Light is the most complex album of the trilogy: the continuous flow of air and voice is even more austere ("Too See The Light"), only briefly disturbed by Justin Vernon's voice (Bon Iver). Less self-contained than the first installment and more eclectic than the second, the saxophonist's new record even dares to cross into hardcore territory on "Brute", drawing out furious sounds never before heard from a bass sax and exploring, with tremendous physical force, cavernous, obsessive tonalities ("High Above A Grey Green Sea", "Hunted").
This new work allows itself plenty of variables, though: the unstoppable flow of arpeggios in “Among The Sef (Righteous II)” and the gospel feel of “What Are They Doing In Heaven Today?” (a cover of a Washington Phillips song) broaden the harmonic contamination to superb effect.

Bon Iver's involvement in the project can nonetheless be called total: the singer deploys different vocal tones and timbres on each of the four tracks he appears on, and the noise shriek that on "Who The Waves Are Roaring For (Hunted II)" wrestles with his seductive voice is pure ecstasy. The long, aforementioned "To See More Light" remains the album's true creative fulcrum: layers of sound piling up now gently, now with violence and despair, while the multi-instrumentalist holds onto a single basic harmonic cycle that induces hypnosis and trance; accelerations, screams, swirling harmonic cycles, breaths and decelerations alternate, eventually dragging the voice, filtered through the sax, toward metallic, noise-laden timbres that nominate Stetson as the Jimi Hendrix of his instrument.

In one of the many interviews following the album's release, the American musician put all critical doubts to rest, stating his true intentions and creative ambitions: "I don't think of my pieces as sonic experiments or timbral abstractions. To me they're very clearly songs. They're not necessarily rooted in American folk song, or pre-war gospel music — I don't listen to a huge amount of that repertoire; my diet consists of a lot of highly melodic music, many classical composers and plenty of metal."
Shortly after, director Alexandre Moors and screenwriter Ronnie Porto contacted Stetson for their film Blue Caprice, a story the two authors admit they wrote and shot with the album New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges constantly playing in the background — the first of a long collaboration between the musician and cinema. To better capture the complex relationship between the film's two protagonists and the explosive mix of violence and tragedy in Blue Caprice, Colin Stetson brought in Sarah Neufeld.
The balance between more abstract compositions and the epic power of certain tracks ("Killing Spree" above all) created a magical synergy between the two musicians, who decided to turn this creative exchange into a fully-fledged album.

Recorded strictly live in the studio, Never Were The Way She Was celebrates simplicity turning complex: the tension between sax and violin generates music with relaxing, subtly nervous atmospheres. Across the album's eight tracks, Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld brush against the limits of eclecticism, putting back into play the pleasant contrast already tested on the Blue Caprice soundtrack, pushing it toward darker, more shadowy territory, with stormy tones and metallic timbres evoking electronic music and the most extreme field recordings.
The two musicians aren't interested in exploiting the more accessible side of their music, but rather in discovering the boundaries of a search that at times verges on the impossible, as when on "In The Vespers", playing with Steve Reich-style minimalism, they shift the axis of sonic chaos from the urban world to the seemingly relaxed one of woods and forests.
Even bolder is the fusion of the two instruments on the title track: violin and sax embrace and entwine until they become one, amid melancholy, aching harmonies that alternate warmth and chill with equal force. It's the same two-faced sonic image that animates the dialogue of "Won't Be A Thing To Become", with Stetson shifting timbres and modulations in a circular continuum that Sarah Neufeld enriches with melodies born from a slightly subdued register, cutting through the music's apparent impenetrability with an almost weird-folk candor.
Stetson is even forced to play the lowest tones of his instrument to give space to the primordial nature of "With The Dark Hug Of Time", an apocalyptic, pre-tribal track that represents an inadvertent creative nadir.
After a few listens it becomes hard not to notice the variety of music the two musicians offer on Never Were The Way She Was: the dreamy, fanciful grace of "The Sun Roars Into View", the almost desert-like landscapes evoked by "And Still The Move" and the cavernous, almost doom(-metal?) sound of "With The Dark Hug Of Time" have little in common with each other; even comparing them to the previously mentioned tracks grows harder, while yet another listen reveals new creative variants.
What remains, in the end, is a pleasant sense of wonder at the two musicians' ability to draw such daring, fascinating music from just two instruments. Colin and Sarah, through a lyrical dialogue full of poetry and intensity, combine elegance and intelligence without ever sounding self-indulgent; the music embraces the visionary force of Arvo Part, with a density and attention to nuance that compensate for a lesser innovative force (perhaps because, by now, everything sounds more familiar).

In 2016 Colin Stetson scored two further soundtracks (Lavender and Outlaws And Angels); that same year he founded his own label, 52Hz, inaugurating it with the release of Sorrow. A Reimagining Of Gorecki's 3rd Symphony.
Known as the "Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs", Henryk Górecki's third symphony is the only contemporary classical recording ever to top the sales charts (in the London Sinfonietta's performance conducted by David Zinman, 1992). The Polish composer, who died in 2010, left behind a formidable lyrical legacy: the three movements of the "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" inspired a generation of musicians not only in classical music but also in avant-garde and rock circles, including Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Faust.

The symphony was composed starting from a Polish folk song, a highly poetic expression of a mother's grief for a son lost in war; a figure of speech that the composer links both to the Virgin Mary and to an inscription found in a Gestapo prison, where a young girl, before being executed, entrusted her prayer that her mother would not fall victim to despair. The symphony is built on simple medieval harmonies and modal scales free of dissonance and virtuosic flourishes, its crescendo having become, over time, the perfect archetype for the sonic representation of grief and suffering. It now falls to Stetson to revive its glories, gathering around him eleven musicians of considerable artistic standing, namely Dan Bennett, Greg Fox, Grey Mcmurray, Gyða Valtýsdóttir, Justin Walter, Matt Bauder, Megan Stetson, Rebecca Foon, Sarah Neufeld, Ryan Ferreira and Shahzad Ismaily.
Stetson makes Henryk Górecki's language his own while respecting the original work, without altering the meaning of its genesis, playing instead on a substitution of instrumental timbres (in the manner of Adrian Utley, Art Tatum, William Orbit, or Isao Tomita). So electric guitar, drums, bass, sax and analog synths take the place of flutes, clarinets, bassoons, brass section and trombones, while the violin, viola and cello string section is replaced by a trio of refined virtuosos of the bowed instrument (Neufeld, Foon, Valtýsdóttir).
Stetson doesn't reinvent, because he doesn't remove anything, but adds sonorities, whose task is to introduce small sonic distortions, alien to the versions known until now. The timbre is at times almost metallic, leaden, and yet it renews the liturgical, transcendental allure of the work.
The new touches are most evident in the first movement: Colin's sax introduces everything with low notes, which are gradually absorbed into the cyclical flow of strings and winds; the harmonies are slightly unsettled by electric guitars and electronics, which inject a curious metal doomtimbre, one that only clears away when Megan Stetson's voice arrives (the real surprise of Sorrow), shaping a reinterpretation that first empties out the symphony's majesty, only to regenerate it with new sonic guises that partly echo the post-apocalyptic sound of Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
The second movement is the best known, as well as the most pillaged by world cinema (not least, “La Grande Bellezza”). Here the drums are the most significant element of the tonal renewal; an unexpected groove creeps in behind Stetson's voice, disrupting, with scraps of electronica and noise built on sax and guitars, the composition's enormous lyrical impact, right up to the drumbeat that puts an end to the pathos, while also announcing the post-rock torments of the third movement.

And it's here, in “III”, that Stetson runs riot with his alien, dark sonorities: the sax becomes the voice of contemporary suffering, with an even sharper, starker, more unexpected and cruel edge, one that not only reaffirms the universal value of Górecki's work, but also opens the door to a new poetics of martyrdom, even more visceral and authentic, and free of any temporal political connotations. And it is precisely in this ideological choice that lies the true keystone of the success of Sorrow.

Announced by Stetson himself as his electronic-contamination album (Autechre and Aphex Twin chief among the influences), All This I Do For Glory is the toughest record of the American musician's now lengthy career, not only because it's the first album of new material for his new label, but also because by this point all the elements that had defined his discography had become familiar.
The stylistic narrative is so predictable that one could write a review of any of his albums without listening to a single track. The circular sound, the technical virtuosity, the complexity of sounds captured in live, overdub-free recordings, the sheer lung power, the flowing minimalism and physical force are so endemic to his work that any observer could sing its praises simply by stringing together the aforementioned traits.
Seemingly devoid of innovation, All This I Do For Glory is the most aggressive project of his career. Physicality does become the most perceptible element of his music, but also the most vulnerable one; the lung effort here is not theatrical — if anything, it resembles a death rattle — and what dominates this time is emotion, spiritual energy.
The writing, deliberately leaner, is still inventive and full of flair; the author's clear intent is to radicalize his style, draining away all the lyrical eclecticism that had, until now, made him palatable even to those who weren't devotees of jazz and the avant-garde. Even the background noise takes on an even more dynamic role.

For the first time, the entire staging and structure of the album rests solely on the musician and his instrument — no collaborators, no supporting voices, no additions. Stetson skillfully treads the line separating acoustic from electronic, the perfection of his technique colliding with an electronic buzz that soils its more meditative, reassuring passages, almost inviting the listener into a new form of tribal music; IDM becomes pulsing sonic matter, making the metallic timbre of "Between Water And Wind" drip with blood and sweat.
While the hypnotic chord sequence of "Like Wolves On The Fold" lingers on the artist's most familiar clichés, the furious "In The Clinches" destabilizes that apparent predictability with a copious flurry of chords and a frantic scream from the sax-filtered voice. It becomes clear, then, that the more imposing physicality of All This I Do For Glory comes paired with greater fragility, the chief symptom of the potential innovative depletion some authoritative critics have floated.
Stetson has instead made his music more human, tying it to contemporary languages of enormous physical impact: the title track, with its near-funky stride, is a potential futurist dancefloor track, aseptic and repetitive to the point of sounding vacuous and nihilistic, ultimately revealing its true blues nature. The richer, more harmonious lyrical whirl of "Spindrift" almost breaks through the constant underlying unease; everything that elsewhere feels undefined finally finds full meaning. The rhythmic cycle and harmonic minimalism intersect with exuberant beauty, the lyrical trance doesn't smother the sound — on the contrary, it frees it toward emotional sublimation — but it's only an illusion: what appears to be a place of peace and rest is instead an emotionally barren, desolate place.
With this record the musician seems, at last, to want to challenge temporal boundaries: the creative divide between the pre-industrial and post-industrial eras of modern music is partly erased; the only true way to defeat rhetoric and creative aridity is to physically strip and drain the sound bare. And this is the great revolution the musician attempts to seal with the final twelve minutes of "The Lure Of The Mine", where the minimalism of Terry Riley and Philip Glass takes on the shape of a sharp weapon ready to conquer the future of the avant-garde. Cascades of notes and rhythms wrap around each other like flesh around bone, dragging the listener into an almost psychedelic vortex, every beat landing like a blow, every note of the sax rattling the mind.

Colin Stetson's ever more complex, frenetic music offers no escape route, perhaps anticipating new semantic revolutions, such as the four-way project Ex Eye, a musical combo in which he stars alongside Greg Fox (Liturgy), Shahzad Ismaily (Secret Chiefs 3, Ceramic Dog) and Toby Summerfield, in an unusual blend of experimentalism and hard rock.
Released on the austere Relapse label, the Ex Eye project is yet another trial by fire for Stetson.
Once again, what prevails is a pleasurably disturbing sense of lexical disorientation, drawing on musical elements already familiar and extensively explored in the past, purely in order to create a constant, vital flow that, far from being innovative or revolutionary, puts forward the only art form still possible: passion.
Odd-meter rhythms, shoegaze fragments applied to black metal, post-rock, scraps of minimalism and free-jazz-adjacent effusions mix together with no apparent mathematical or physical geometry, as if the ultimate goal were to drag the listener into a sonic trip that resists full identification. Stetson partly steps back from the lead role, leaving the creative fulcrum of the five tracks to Fox's ever-engaging rhythmic inventions, even though Ex Eye remains, in the end, a collective project, the result of a robust and intense stylistic alloy.

The fascinating hybridization of sax with the band's intricate post-metal groove keeps the album's pathos constantly elevated, masterfully making up for a few gaps in the songwriting. Every track shows interesting quirks, from the layered synths and sax of "Xenolith; The Anvil" to the frantic and ultimately dreamlike hypnotic progressions of drums, guitars and trombones on "Opposition/Perihelion; The Coil", right up to the surprising Mars Volta-style prog contaminations of "Tten Crowns; The Corruptor", a track included only in the digital edition of the album.

Some doubts arise from a closer or more casual listen: taken in small doses, the album reveals a mood steeped in stylistic deja-vu that feel compelling more for Stetson's presence than for the project's actual creative reach.
Venial sins, of course, but it can't be denied that the album's most creative moment comes in the apotheosis of "Form Constant; The Grid", where the group throws itself with greater boldness and recklessness into an instrumental fusion that borders on chaos. It's clear that the Ex Eye project is a potential war machine still searching for the right target to unleash its apocalypse upon.

Meanwhile, another project three years in the making finally arrives: the soundtrack for the horror film "Hereditary", the debut of director Ari Aster, who like Alexandre Moors, the director of the aforementioned Caprice, says he was influenced by Colin Stetson's music while conceiving and developing the project.
Colin Stetson, like other illustrious predecessors, takes the opportunity to dig deeper into the dark side of his sonic research, never raising the volume—indeed, doing away with the screams and din that may shock a listener or viewer but never leave behind that sense of emptiness and disorientation that is the offspring of the purest terror.

Stetson and Aster favor a slow agony: the music feeds on the same empty spaces that, in the world of images, translate into an exhausting wait for the inevitable.
What Stetson inflicts on the musical fabric are less like cuts than scratches, leaving the listener in a cathartic, suspended state, perpetually waiting for some resolving moment that might reveal either the film's plot or the leitmotif of a score that seems to steer clear of the gothic-horror pathos typical of similar works.
The tracks are often jagged, deliberately incomplete, truncated, as if to leave further room for the imagination; only a few passages of the score attempt to condense the enormous emotional and harmonic flow in a more conventional way.

Ever skillful at reshaping the genesis of sound, Colin Stetson compensates for the deliberate exclusion of strings by doubling the clarinet's sound with his voice, achieving a solemn timbre that never tips into grandiosity.
Likewise, the synchronized use of a contrabass clarinet and a bass clarinet produces vibrations similar to those of a synth. Even what sounds like percussion is the result of ingenious sound-manipulation techniques: in this case, through the keys of the wind instruments recorded with microphones placed right up close. At this point it's almost pointless to single out one track over another—the twenty-three chapters of Hereditary form a single continuous flow, the score running without a single dip, managing the difficult feat of standing on its own against the striking, disturbing images, yet another confirmation of Colin Stetson's talent.

After six years of soundtracks and detours, When We Were That What Wept For The Sea stakes its claim as the ideal successor to the American artist's finest work: sixteen compositions spanning seventy minutes of music, a heartfelt tribute to Stetson's father, who recently passed away. A project with little inclination toward experimentation, yet not without some genuinely interesting surprises, the album draws on the artist's deep relationship with the world of images. When We Were That What Wept For The Sea is built on a series of harmonically powerful, evocative ideas—some serving as a connective thread running through the long arc, the five chapters of "The Lighthouse", others underscoring the emotional urgency that gave rise to the work, while certain shifts in direction call into question, for the first time, the systematic nature of Colin Stetson's work. For some time now, the musician's ambitions have leaned toward a more all-encompassing language; the same minimalism that underpinned the glories of the New History Warfare trilogy is now part of a broader project.
Colin Stetson tries his hand at the endless variations on a theme typical of classical music, while at the same time folding jazz and ethnic influences into a single creative model, enlisting the help of several figures from contemporary experimental folk-ambient. It's almost as if the musician has learned to dream—the dimension here is more otherworldly, magical, suspended. When We Were That What Wept For The Sea adds many gems to Stetson's songbook: the powerful physicality of "Long Before The Sky Would Open", the cinematic cut of the enchanting "Passage" and the unsettling, poignant lyricism of "The Surface And The Light". For the rest, Colin Stetson dispenses, as ever, pieces crafted with inimitable technical mastery (the title track), circular melodies of ecstatic beauty ("Wrathful Seas Quiesce"), impetuous passages where the sax keys dictate the rhythm ("Fireflies"), alternating between pauses ("Safe With Me") and explosions ("Behind The Sky") that keep tension and attention high despite the album's demanding length.

Alternating his role as a soundtrack composer, Stetson signs a new deal with Invada for the darkest, most intense album of his career. 
Recorded in an old industrial building now used as a contemporary art museum, the Darling Foundry in Montreal, The Love It Took To Leave You is an album marked by a noir ferocity that pushes Colin Stetson's guttural tones toward the already-breached frontiers of black metal, letting rivers of rhythmic tension and an expressive fury flow that leaves you breathless, elevating the track "The Six" to the role of catalyst for the occult energies stirring within the Canadian's new album. An unprecedented sonic dimension animates these ample seventy-three minutes of lashing, imaginary film scenes; in Colin Stetson's sonic film-narrative there's no room for extras or stunt doubles—the only protagonists are the artist, his instrument, and the place itself. The vast space of brick, concrete and steel heightens the saxophonist's circular-breathing technique, taking on the role of a key element in this extreme minimalist distillation of jazz, drone music and dark ambient. The industrial, tribal tones of "Hollowing", the three minutes and thirty-nine seconds of pure terror in "To Think We Knew From Fear", the unsettling "So Say The Soaring Bullbats", and the more archetypal "Malediction" reveal a decidedly darker side of Colin Stetson's world, setting up the nearly twenty-two minutes of the album's heaviest track, "Strike Your Forge And Grin", a riot of drone music and sax notes sucked into a black hole, which, like some pernicious cosmic hiss, takes hold of the mind until it's drained of blood—a solemn piece in which the life-breath Stetson gives the instrument resounds like one last desperate cry for help.
Enthralled by the poignant, poetic beauty of the title track, one of the album's most original and moving pieces, and charmed by moments of light respite ("The Augur") and ethereal beauty ("Ember"), all that's left to do is file The Love It Took To Leave You away as one of Colin Stetson's most accomplished and innovative works.   

Stetson's music remains a unique concentration of technique and sonic poetry; the real novelty of "When We Were That What Wept For The Sea" is that the artist no longer needs to raise his voice to give his music momentum—his breath alone is enough.