Tonus: Cagean Morphology
A New Wave Of Jazz

Tonus: Intermediate Obscurities I + IV
A New Wave Of Jazz

When Dirk Serries announced that his excellent 2018 set Epitaph would be his final release of vintage ambient material, one part of me expected he'd follow the two-CD set with an even more intense brand of high-decibel free jazz than the kind he'd earlier issued on his New Wave Of Jazz label. How surprising, then, to be presented with a triptych of releases that's even quieter than Epitaph, three exercises in extreme minimalism that strip music to its skeletal core. Each is credited to Tonus (literally, “muscle strength”), a name that serves as an umbrella term for Serries on acoustic guitar, his wife Martine Verhoeven on piano, and an ever-malleable cast of others. That the Belgian guitarist is credited with acoustic on all three rather than his standard electric is obviously an immediate sign that the project's unlike any other with which he's been involved.

The seed for Tonus was planted during a 2017 residency when Serries convened a sextet to create material using a piano motif by Verhoeven as a starting point. Performances by that ensemble are featured on Intermediate Obscurities I + IV, a double-CD set performed by two iterations of the group, one that appeared at the Jazzcase residency in Belgium and the other at Hundred Years Gallery in London. The second release, Texture Point, pares the ensemble to a trio with Serries and Verhoeven joined by British violist Benedict Taylor, while the third, Cagean Morphology, features the married couple only.

An in-studio piece recorded in March 2018 and described on the inner sleeve as an “exercise in minimalist composing in real time,” the duo set's a single-track, thirty-four minute performance comprised of the tiniest of brushstrokes. If one were to add up precisely how much time is dedicated to pregnant pauses and silence, in all likelihood there would more of that than instrument sounds. Typically, a single note by one, often an emphatic splash of colour, is answered by the same from the other, which engenders a further response, and so on, the couple's dialogue executed with an almost unnerving degree of patience and discipline. Tension pervades this spacious meditation as the resonance of one note fades away before the equally resonant pluck of the next follows. Think of it as an introspective, minimalistic exercise in time-suspension and deep listening.

Without betraying the minimalism principle, Tonus's world naturally expands with Taylor added to Texture Point, which presents four settings as opposed to one only. Just as Serries and Verhoeven favour single-note plucks, Taylor eschews conventional statements for gentle plucks and guttural scrapes, his bow for the latter dragged across the strings to produce raw expressions (one might, in isolated moments, be forgiven for thinking of Tony Conrad in his early Theatre of Eternal Music period or John Cale during his tenure with The Velvet Underground). The balance between instrument sounds and silence tips in the former's favour, with the three largely filling the space while still leaving enough room for notes to bleed into silence. Though the general character of the fifty-three-minute recording is still meditative, there's a greater amount of activity than on the duo set, which makes for a more animated result, even if the trio's methodical interplay is often of the lurching and stop-start variety.

Arguably the release with the broadest potential appeal is Intermediate Obscurities I + IV, which presents different sextet configurations on two discs, the first a single-track, fifty-eight-minute live performance recorded in Belgium in November 2017 (following a three-day residency) and the second also live, this one forty-five minutes and captured in London on January 14th, 2018. On disc one, Serries and Verhoeven are joined by Jan Daelman (flute), George Hadow (drums), Nils Vermeulen (double bass), and Colin Webster (alto saxophone), an all-acoustic outfit that could execute an uptempo brand of free jazz if it were so inclined. But in keeping with the spirit of the Tonus concept, the musicians opt for methodical, lurching flow and single-note statements untethered from regulated tempo. Moments of silence are naturally in shorter supply on this release, with the expressions now tending to overlap and assemble into multilayered formation. Distinct contrasts in timbres also allows for clear separation between the instruments, which makes for a rich, stimulating sound field. Hadow restrainedly punctuates the flow with percussive accents, while the others colour this generally peaceful landscape with painterly gestures and sustained tones, from the rasp of Webster's sax and groan of Vermeulen's double bass to the murmur of Daelman's flute. Dissonance sometimes creeps into the performance when pitches combine, but the material is largely placid in character, the execution ultra-disciplined and the outfit more chamber ensemble than jazz group.

November 2018