CODA - Art Lange

Navigations

Chris Burn’s Ensemble, consisting of eleven experienced improvisers like saxist John Butcher, trumpeter Axel Dorner, and violinist Phil Durrant, narrows its focus to that of the varying textures of sound against sound in intuitive, unpredictable settings. Nudged along by minimal predetermined instructions, and conveyed with such delicate, yet convincing gestures, the music on Navigations (Acta 12) reveals dazzling colors amid a sparse, mysterious, ominously inviting climate — like the ampli fied sound of a garden growing.
Deceptively subtle, these pieces effect a confusion of Time in the manner of traditional Japanese music (without sounding at all similar), where movement appears to be gradual, but surprising events occur quickly and disappear.

CODA - Andrew Choate

Horizontals White

2 minutes into the title track John Russell flies his pick 24 times over dampened guitar strings, like a sudden flapping of wings sweeping into and out of the room; Matt Hutchinson's synthesizer drones; John Butcher's saxophone pops one breath; a rumbling chord from Chris Burn's piano decays; Mark Wastell bows a fiercefully precise yet hushed line from his cello; Rhodri Davies buoys the reverberation from a low harp string; something tinny scrapes the floor. These 10 seconds swiftly appear after a brief pause springs up from the lurching, provisional motions of the improvisation's opening minutes; the hectic intrusion leaves an ominous residue, and an emotion rarely excavated in improvised music materializes - fear. For the next few minutes, the group grapples with what happened, and what it might mean for the future, their actions conjuring or containing the suspense of the inevitable: sonic emergence during time's unceasing unfurling.

Though the lineup slightly shifts from recording to recording, the last 15 years have produced four CDs by the Chris Burn Ensemble, each one upping the ante for riveting improvisation. Comprised of two London concert recordings from 2001, HORIZONTALS WHITE brings light to a new range of communicative interplay and atmospheric layering. An interchange of quick saxophone puckers with gently fluffed guitar harmonics and a sparking electronic trill mark the beginning of There Were Five In Eight. Harsh, prickly dissonance during Verticals Blue lapses into the placid serenity of small, sparkling sounds. Like good news on a rainy day, a squeaky flowering flashes through during the slow-moving tension of microsonic layers halfway into Horizontals White. The willingness of the Chris Burn Ensemble to explore darker emotions and how they contrast with the beauty surrounding them (and vice versa) returns the depth of potential implied by - but frequently missing from - improvised music back into its practice.

SIGNAL TO NOISE - Michael Rosenstein

Horizontals White

Since its inception in the late 80s, pianist Chris Burn's Ensemble has developed into one of the pre-eminent collectives of forward-thinking collective playing.
Each of the two sets provides multi-hued settings for the collective exploration of intricate gestural details. Here, microtones, clipped and damped strings, fluttered multiphonics, shimmering electronics, and hanging shadow notes slowly coalesce, morph, and decay over the course of extended interplay. Though individual voices move in and out of primary focus within the context of the focus within the context of the constantly evolving cross-currents of the ensemble, the group collectively steers the improvisations from sections of hushed, microscopic gestures to bristling density with astonishing attention to developing form and detail. Evan as they reach tempestuous heights, there is always a transparency to the sound, revealing the singularity of each member. On the three pieces recorded at freedom of the city, the quintet (without Davies) creates a more open tableau. Here, one can more readily discern how ideas are passed around the group. Butcher's burred trills may elicit scrubbed string overtones from Russell, which are cushioned by rumbled hums and darting scribbles from Hutchinson's synth, mirrored by Burn's damped strums of the piano strings and Wastell's scraped harmonics. Motifs pop up and then are rapidly grasped and transformed by each of the players and fed back in to the collective mix.
This release continues to cement the standing of the now fluid cast of Ensemble as unparalleled collaborators, and of Burn as one of the leading instigators of engaging and challenging improvisation.

ALL ABOUT JAZZ - John Kelman

At Musica Genera

Free improvisation in a new music context can often be a challenge. How to create new sonic landscapes? How to provide a structure that encourages collective improvisation? How to stretch the limits of traditional instruments in new and unheard-of ways? With his Ensemble at Musica Genera 2002, Chris Burn and company provide at least some of the answers in a program which challenges conventional concepts of both sound and improvisation.
Burn is a pianist who eschews all convention on his instrument. Rarely, if ever, does one actually hear what one can clearly identify as a piano. That is, in fact, both an asset and a liability of the entire ensemble: it is almost impossible to clearly identify what any of its members are doing. Unlike Evan Parker’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, where the individual performers are clearly delineated even through the electronic treatments, there is a certain selflessness to Burn's ensemble – which may or may not be a good thing. Since two-thirds of the ensemble consists of long-standing members, Burn evidently appreciates the specific contributions each member makes. But it remains a challenge for the listener to appreciate any specific performance; rather, one has to simply accept what is presented simply for what it is.
The program, recorded live in Poland in 2002, consists of three group improvisations and three composed pieces. It is difficult to differentiate between them, as the overall sound is so foreign, so alien, that there are no traditional forms to hang on to. Nevertheless, on a piece like Burn’s “Rotacja,” there are moments where the ensemble seems to converge on a single idea which would imply a structure that is less-than-clearly there. Using microtonality, layered textures and tone colours, the ensemble shifts from near-silence to bursts of cacophonous noise.

SLEEVE NOTES by Richard Barrett

NAVIGATIONS

"A dense forest that presents no obstacle to the mind or eye (or other sense)” Cornelius Cardew, performing instruction in The Great Learning.

These "navigations" traverse an almost limitless landscape of sonic possibilities. Each member of Ensemble of course is an accomplished improviser; each has effectively recreated his or her instrument as an intricately flexible sound-generator. But the history of improvised music is littered with one-off projects which have attempted to bring together larger-than-usual numbers of such performers, and the majority of the results have ended up being somewhat less than the sum of their parts: there is a certain inertia about a large body of players, according to received wisdom, which needs the discipline of notated composition to channel its energies into something musically meaningful. The music on this CD is as eloquent a counterargument as you could wish for; while the sheer range of sound-colours is unfathomably vast, the musical momentum is maintained by spontaneous interactions at a lightning-quick level. Even when the entire group is simultaneously active, there's a transparency about the sound which belies their numbers.

On the other hand, there's very little 'soloistic' playing; however, this feature isn't felt as a type of activity being deliberately excluded, but as a discipline which constantly throws the attention onto the textures of the group, textures which at one point evolve seamlessly into one another, and at the next jump unpredictably between alternative worlds. So it somehow seems inappropriate to mention individual contributions: the ensemble is what matters - moreover, when one 'voice' does come to the fore, more often than not it falls silent or reintergrates itself with the 'landscape' almost before there's been time to identify it.

It's no secret that Ensemble organises its musical structures with the help of various skeletal kinds of score: these are 'navigations', after all, not speculative meanderings through uncharted territory. The scores exist to enable each member of the group to contribute his or her own music to Ensemble, each piece a differently-angled approach to this process, not a 'compositorial' setting-down of musical ideas-in the end, this group couldn't in any way be said to fall between the stools of composition and improvisation (if stools they are): what you hear on this CD is 'improvised music'. It does the things which only improvised music can do.

Which isn't to say that it has no roots in the traditions of 20th century composition (to name only these); though, again, a roll-call of 'influences' would miss the point - it's true that the diverse backgrounds and experiences of the eleven musicians all have some kind of part to play, but there's an overriding identity to Ensemble which I would say is stronger, more clearly delineated, than on its previous CD Cultural Baggage, even with the addition of three more players - and stronger than the identity of the majority of composers, be it said. This may be Chris Burn's Ensemble, but, having set the concept and the carefully-calculated instrumentation in motion, he isn't in the business of using it as a context for his own playing, except in as much as his ever-sensitive use of extensions of piano technique (using preparations and activating the strings directly in various ways) is a model for the way in which Ensemble extends the sound of its 'ensemble'.

Navigations is all the more convincing for being somewhat understated, not forcing itself on your attention, but beckoning you over to take a look down its aural microscope: before long, its myriad evanescent life-forms prove as captivating as anything you'll come across in contemporary music.