TIGRAN HAMASYAN - The Call Within

He's cerebral – not to say cerebral-to-a-fault – meticulous, monomaniacal. A master of rhythm, of interlocking patterns thrust into the foreground without ever shying away from the baroque, the mannered, or the occasional gust of pure showiness. His latest work, released just days ago, is already spawning fan theories and videos dissecting its structure in minute detail.

No, we're not talking about Christopher Nolan and his much-discussed “Tenet“, but rather the equally dazzling Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan, who at thirty-three released his ninth solo LP on August 28th, again put out by the prestigious Nonesuch label and mastered by Nate Wood.

Those who've followed him for a while have witnessed, in recent years, a marked departure from the hyperkinetic style that drove his output up through the masterful “Mockroot“, chameleonic yet rigorous and deeply personal in its reworking of traditional Armenian musicality. With his move to the ever-serious ECM and his collaboration with the sacred monsters Arve Henriksen, Eivind Aarset and Jan Bang, his more recent efforts had embraced a sparser, more impressionistic formula, one that certainly piqued the curiosity of fans of the more ambient-leaning strain of modern classical, but also had longtime followers wondering: when is he going to get serious again?

“The Call Within” is the clear answer. Not only does it decisively plant itself back in the math-prog-folk-jazz vein (it had to be written somewhere in this review) that made Hamasyan's name, but it also finds a way to fold the ambient dimension into the recipe, sometimes through brief interludes dotting the tracklist (“At A Post-Historic Seashore”, “Old Maps”, “37 Newlyweds”), sometimes as a constitutive element of more eclectic compositions (witness the kaleidoscopic “Our Film”).

The main course, however, goes right back to being the labyrinthine, quintessential jazz-prog built on Middle Eastern scales and hyper-intricate time signatures. While giving up some of the explicit forays into metal territory that had made a few listeners wince in the past, Hamasyan manages to boost the sonic power of the tracks: the result comes not so much from shifting the stylistic core of his pianism – which boldly alternates extreme harshness with luminous vaporousness – but from giving free rein to his collaborators, above all Swiss drummer Arthur Hnatek, already his partner back in the days of "Mockroot". It is indeed Hnatek's blacksmith-like finesse, striking even for those used to the forcefulness of Joey Baron, that counterbalances with granite-like sturdiness the elusiveness of Hamasyan's constant melodic-rhythmic about-faces. Then again, by his own admission, the Armenian pianist came to jazz by improvising over his father's Led Zeppelin records: no surprise, then, that his flourishes feel perfectly at home over a resoundingly hard-hitting backbone.

To describe the album's standout tracks simply as virtuoso jazz over pummeling drums would, however, be rather reductive. The rhythmic articulation of Hamasyan's compositions in fact matches – and perhaps here even surpasses – the boldest polyrhythmic contortions of djent cornerstones like Tool and Meshuggah, both long-standing and obvious inspirations for the musician. What sets the Armenian apart is his geographic background, which, combined with his study of traditional music, allows him to move through metric schemes alien to the European canon with a naturalness and expressiveness unthinkable for entire legions of strapping odd-time-signature parvenus.

A case in point is "Levitation 21", a monumental tour de force placed at the opening of the album and already in circulation for some time as the record's teaser. Across five minutes of constant reversals, the track dissects the unthinkable 21/8 time signature into a panoply of additive compositions. The polygonal diagram depicted on the cover, besides evoking some unspecified mystical-esoteric imagery, is meant precisely as a visual representation of the multiplicity of rhythmic structures explored by the piece.

Similar trajectories run through the eight minutes of "Ara Resurrected" (dedicated to the 2018 "velvet revolution", its title borrowed from the name of a demigod of pre-Christian Armenia), "Vortex" and "New Maps", though each track is its own musical odyssey: "Vortex" features a guest appearance from djent guitar guru Tosin Abasi (Animals as Leaders), while "New Maps" especially showcases the bass versatility of Evan Marien, the third and newest member of the lineup behind the LP. Accompanied by a poem written by Hamasyan himself, the album's closing track is perhaps the one that most deliberately explores a multitude of sonic and emotional landscapes: suspension, lightness, but also urgency, brutality, light, shadow, ecstasy, closure.

In the end, it is precisely the clarity with which the emotional dimension emerges, and the broad range it covers, that makes the music of "The Call Within" radically different from the more convoluted – but ultimately also monotonous – experiments in math rock. In Hamasyan's hands, complexity is at every turn an expressive tool for giving shape to a variety of feelings and perspectives.

Even when the tracks venture into territory unusual for the artist (both "Our Film" and "Old Maps" explore the chunky beats of glitch-hop), the connections remain very strong with those parts of his musicality that most overtly come straight from the heart: the whistling, the sung lines that double the piano notes, the choral inserts.

It's perhaps precisely in this almost disarming expressive transparency that one finds what ties the hair-raising math-jazz aesthetic, which forcefully returns to center stage on "The Call Within", to the more muted tones of his records from recent years: however he chooses to stock his palette, Tigran Hamasyan always experiences music as a shimmering transposition of his states of mind. Even where artifice would seem to dominate, what always wins out is his irrepressible spirituality.

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02/09/2020