Scarla O'Horror / Semiconductor Taxidermy for the Masses
マイルス・デイヴィス、スティーヴ・レイシー、サン・ラー、ハービー・ハンコック、ジョー・ザヴィヌル等、先達によるジャズとエレクトロニックのユニークな融合を継承したような、James Allsopp（ジェームス・オールソップ：テナーサックス／バスクラリネット）、Alex Bonney（アレックス・ボニー：トランペット）、Tim Giles（ティム・ジャイルズ：ドラムス／エレクトロニクス）、Isambard Khroustaliov（イザムバード・フルスタリョフ：エレクトロニクス）の4者によるフリージャズのフランケンシュタインと評されるユニットScarla O'Horror（スカーラ・オホラー）の2024年リリースのアルバム!!! 演奏に反応するように設定されたシンセサイザーによって生成された素材に基づいて、それぞれのミュージシャンが反応するという、人間と機械の間のユニークなフィードバックセッション！ <a href="https://not-applicable.bandcamp.com/album/semiconductor-taxidermy-for-the-masses">Semiconductor Taxidermy for the Masses Scarla O'Horror</a> Jazz and the electronic have collided on many a previous occasion - Miles Davis, Steve Lacy, Sun Ra, Herbie Hancock and Joe Zawinul spring to mind and there are fleeting reminders of each of those sonic cartographers on Scarla O' Horror's latest album. This, however, is a unique meld. James Allsopp (tenor saxophone, bass clarinet), Alex Bonney (trumpet, piccolo trumpet), Tim Giles (drums, electronics) and Isambard Khroustaliov (electronics) recorded the album over the course of a day at Livingstone Studios. Their improvisations were based on material generated by synthesisers configured to 'listen' and respond to what the instrumentalists were playing, material to which the musicians responds in turn - a unique feedback between man and machine but the very opposite of GPT style AI in terms of its spontaneity (not involving sampling or pre-training of any kind). Given that Scarla O' Horror work in the combined realms of the electric and the acoustic it would be tempting to label their music as electroacoustic. However, with all the dry schematics and diagrammatic approach that term implies, it doesn't quite do justice to Scarla O' Horror, a living, breathing, mutating, growling, pealing, thundering, spontaneous thing. In this approach, Semiconductor Taxidermy For The Masses represents a development of impulses first investigated on Voltage Controlled Parade Music Vol. 1 (2022), as the band explain: "The idea for Semiconductor Taxidermy For The Masses came about as a document of our experiments using acoustic instruments to influence how Isambard's robot synthesisers react to different instruments. In the studio, the electronics had access to everything each of the instrumentalists played separately, and the behavior of each of the synthesisers was then fed back to the players in real time. This process forms the basis of the improvisations and the album is a document of this approach. It's an approach that develops the techniques first documented on the album 'Voltage Controlled Parade Music Vol. 1' made two years earlier, with the added granularity of everyone being in separate rooms but connected electronically." [Tim Giles] "In different configurations, we have been making music together for about twenty years now. We have all developed a language of interaction together that is well established and coherent. Having this conversation in real-time with the synthesiser elements really opens up a lot of new possibilities and forces us to reevaluate our preexisting way of making music together. It's very exciting to feel challenged by an element in the music that can respond in such a dizzying and kaleidoscopic manner." [James Allsopp] "There is a specificity about the electronics we work with in Scarla O'Horror that's very much a part of the sound world and the intention; everything is synthesis, there's no sampling and that decision felt really appropriate considering the idea of how the design of instruments help shape musical expression. When I'm working with a synthesiser that someone else has designed, it's very much a process of getting to know that instrument, its logic and its idiosyncrasies. Added to this, the synthesisers are all computer controlled, so there's a machine listening aspect to it as well, where I'm effectively working with the way machines listen in order to encourage the synthesisers to have a conversation with James, Alex and Tim. So we're all using improvisation as a means to explore and investigate particular instruments that have been designed and built by other people, in most cases also for a completely different intention. There's a relationship to the history of jazz that informs this process, in the sense that jazz picked up various instruments and forged new types of musical expression around them. When Sun Ra included a suite of improvisations using a Moog Model D prototype, recorded at the Moog factory before the synthesiser had even gone into production, it seemed to me that he opened a door onto a musical universe that few people have since explored again. I think part of what we're doing in Scarla O'Horror is exploring this dimension of sound he discovered and how it has the potential to explode musical traditions." [Isambard Khroustaliov] The album commences with "Raccoon With Wound", a sort of overture, a taster of what is to come, in which the spirits of Don Cherry, Eric Dolphy and Albert Ayler among others are summoned, then brought into confrontation with a welter of electronics, like some sci-fi encounter between a Greek Titan and Godzilla. This joyful tussle, an electric and acoustic feeding frenzy, where each tear strips off one another, comes to a crescendo with "The Rats Of Gillet Square". The title was inspired by group members standing outside the Vortex Jazz Club watching rats plunder the bins and, apparently, having a merry old time of it. Taking the approach they do, Scarla O' Horror are deeply conscious that, in 21st century jazz, there are cozy iterations that are welcome in the nightclubs and more challenging ones which are not. When you're on the search for something, sometimes the only option is to go rogue, like the gleefully scavenging rats, and stay on the outside, rather than languish on the inside, in the well-honed, polite, upholstered confines of the cognoscenti. The groove unfurls in perpetuity, squalling heights are reached for, Ra's electric cosmos glimpsed, as man and machine spit new permutations at one another. Finally, the relative tranquility, the aftermath of "Ermine Chowder", a touch more ambient, exploratory, mapping out new skies, fresh formations as if a new hole has been torn in the universe. This is a music that uses machine data and yet is entirely the product of human experimentation. A free jazz Frankenstein. The album artwork and CD booklet summons a carnival of 19th Century biological drawing, where Darwin's ghost meets the cybernetic musings of Anthony Stafford Beer. Dreamt up by an incognito master graphic designer under the guise Atelier Elephant it adds another dimension to the already think haze of allegory. （Not Applicable） 1. Raccoon With Wound 2. The Rats of Gillet Square 3. Ermine Chowder James Allsopp – tenor saxophone & bass clarinet Alex Bonney – trumpet & piccolo trumpet Tim Giles – drums and electronics Isambard Khroustaliov – electronics Recorded by Marcus Locock & Luke Farnell at Livingstone Studios Mixed and Mastered by Isambard Khroustaliov & Alex Bonney at Coda to Coda Artwork by Gareth Humphreys Format：CD Label：Not Applicable (UK)
