GRAHAM LAMBKIN / TAKU UNAMI - The Whistler

Projecting onto a theoretical horizon such a banal, everyday action as whistling a tune, we might venture to call it the ultimate gesture of reduction and abstraction of musical matter. In the mind of the whistler - and often in that of the listener too - there exists a far more complex set of elements relating to a piece's rhythm, instrumentation and arrangement; but if we make the effort to detach these involuntary associations from the present, external moment, all that's left is a bare, incomplete melodic line, a stream of air that all but evaporates in the passage from thought to action.

This gave me an incidental excuse to return to talking about the non-music periodically released on Erstwhile, a wellspring of ever-new collaborations between artists who have made discretion their poetic hallmark. Names that invariably recur, like a chorus of silent voices exchanging coded messages, interacting unseen and creating works that begin almost from nothing and return to it, like parentheses in the world's sprawling discourse.

A year ago Graham Lambkin continued the ErstSolo series with "Community" (alongside Keith Rowe's four-disc "testament" Keith Rowe), while the even more prolific Taku Unami appeared as a duo with Devin DiSanto in a live recording made at the Fridman Gallery in New York in 2015. The material reworked on their double album "The Whistler" comes from two days of field recordings made in gardens, streets and parks near St. Peter's Cemetery in Poughkeepsie, New York, as well as from some recordings Lambkin made at home with his children.

The only (un)helpful clues offered to the listener come from two short texts by the authors: one made up of sparse diary-like notes on the pair's meeting, the other a prose poem dedicated to the "whistler" as a figure external to them, the putative cause of their experiment's failure.

Met Taku from taxi – he arrived with a paper bag containing eight long black seed pods, a ball of twine and a sachet of tea as a house gift. I had less. […] (GL)

in the depth of the night, the whistler appeared somewhere in upstate New York. their supernatural mastery afforded them the witchcraft necessary to keep balance in the world, but had no use for spells or magic wand twirls; the whistler needed only to whistle to conjure their magic. […] (TU)

For the sake of simplicity, we might consider these excerpts a reflection of each artist's outlook on reality: Lambkin generally adheres to it more faithfully, preserving the concreteness and familiarity of sounds, even though the effect of his collages and acoustic manipulations can be likened to the impossible perspectives of Cubist painters; Unami maintains his own distinctive bond with the Japanese aesthetic of onkyokei through minimal or absent gestures, continually making himself visible and invisible within space, whether ideal/artificial ("Teatro Assente", with Takahiro Kawaguchi) or natural (as in this case, or in "Parazoan Mapping", with Éric La Casa).

From similar sources, then, come two works on separate CDs: in Graham's words, his "Small Mistakes In Nature" is said to be full of exaggeration and cruel humor, while on "Whistler Vanished In Wind" Taku politely erases both from the landscape - as the segmented artwork suggests.

Beyond that, what remains is what Lawrence English Lawrence English calls "relational listening": the attempt to convey an individual listening experience by reconstructing it according to free associations and personal preferences. The duo of Lambkin and Unami represents a further experiment built on the seemingly autonomous existence of sound, even when it stems from or is directly traceable to an external agent; it is also yet another demonstration of how, starting from ever-different elements and theoretical premises, one can reach such an extreme degree of synthesis as to place them virtually on the same plane - at once alien and familiar to our ordinary perception.

In any case, the whistler failed miserably in their performance of the long-awaited whistling ritual, probably from having drunk too much of that "burdock tea from the Far East". This mistake created a questionable notion of balance, blurring the meanings of perfection and error. The whistler resigned himself to the fact that every part of nature was, in that single moment, the fusion of errors as well as part of a broader misunderstanding. (my translation)

P.S. A magnificent coincidence has it that "whistler" is almost the exact anagram of "erstwhile".

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13/06/2017