Tierce #2

Caisson

Label: Another Timbre Country: UK

"With the Caisson CD I think we all feel that this meeting between intuitive composition, sound & improvisation has a language of its own. The aspect of listening is constantly shifting in a forward motion. Moments are at the core of what fascinates me & Tierce seems to be able to find those naturally within the emerging frame of the piece."-Jez riley French

"Tierce is an international trio of electroacoustic musicians which has existed since 2007: first Jez riley French (electronics, objects, field-recordings, zither, contact mics, etc..), Daniel Jones on turntables and electronics, and finally, Ivan Palacký on amplified knitting machine (... yes you read that right). The performance that gave rise to the disc Caisson was a single piece lasting an hour at a concert recorded in an art gallery in Hull in November 2010.

So imagine a fairly large box or cabinet ('caisson') of any sort, the important thing being the space that it contains rather than its function. Because space seems essential for these three musicians: the electroacoustic music offered here is a kind of sound design in which the sounds define and individualise the space as they fill it. What sounds then? It's difficult to say; it navigates constantly across DIY electronics, field recordings of all sorts (bells, various background soundscapes, birds etc...) and strange sounds that are unrecognisable. All this is mixed together and merged into a single fluctuating, shifting field, which is both light and corrosive, aggressive and calm. No hierarchy is established between the various sound sources, they all belong to a single stratum. And this stratum carves a space out of time, a space that is created at the same moment as it is inhabited by the music.

Of course, there is a particular form of sonic exploration at work in Caisson; each of the three musicians trace a soundworld that is strictly personal, but timbre doesn't seem to be their primary concern. They all seem more interested in the spatial properties and characteristics of the sounds: how will such a noise fill the space?, how will the hearing of some other sound be experienced within the spatial environment? Caisson plays above all with sensory perception ("micro-listening" as Jez riley French says in his interview for Another Timbre), the trio plays with the possibilities of changing our perception (which is auditory in one sense, but also visual, and - why not? - olfactory and taste-based) through a careful listening that evolves in a global environment whose objectivity and solidity are here put in question.

However, despite the tranquility that characterizes it, this music is also rather tense, doubtless because of these constant shifts and fluctuations, partly as if any form of stasis was feared, but also because of the often abrasive sounds that are used, which progressively fill the space in an apparently ineluctable process. A space that is filled, but not only by sounds: silence also has a prominent place across the spaces of this piece, a silence so pervasive that it becomes the equal of the sounds with which it interacts. Silences of a frighteningly heavy substance. A music that is above all not static, nor linear, but which evolves across an unstable terrain that is in flux, across spaces that are sometimes saturated with noises, or else with silences, but also across airy regions that would be suitable for meditative contemplation. An approach that flirts with the infinite (time as well as space), so calm and poised that no border would be able to delimit this universe.

I haven't heard Tierce's first album, which was released on Jez riley French's label, but Caisson, despite some difficulties in approaching it due to the considerable attention it requires, takes us on a unique micro-sensory journey across a space that the musicians have brought into being and in which they are fully invested. Their approach to sound and its 'intuitive' unfolding is radical, and this creates a music that is bizarre, unexpected and unprecedented, but once you have overcome your cultural reticence, Caisson has the ability to take the listener inside some fantastic spaces where the Kantian categories of perception are annihilated at the same time as they are exacerbated. A supernatural music seems to allow the opening, maturing and fulfilment as much of perception itself as of the things perceived (especially sound, and space and time)."-Julien Heraud, Improv-Sphere