Colin Stetson's Latest is Out Now
The love it took to leave you
The love it took to leave you, the new album by multi-instrumentalist Colin Stetson, whose remarkable performances on solo bass saxophone remind me of a monster being tortured (that in a good way!), is my newest exploration into the world of reed players who vocalize while playing.
Lila Bazooka, on Arashiyama, use this technique in a haunting manner, but on bassoon. I witnessed a live performance of a clarinetist growling through his instrument as he performed a piece by a Russian composer, called simply “Prayer.”
The first track on The love it took to leave you, is the title track. I think this is the first time I’m seeing the title track be the first track, and it is haunting. The opening bars are a tenor sax combined with Stetson’s vocalizations through his nose or through the saxophone, with the reverb of a huge space. Stetson takes advantage of this effect to cause strongly played notes of the incredibly fast arpeggios to linger as if they were phantoms in the mind. The track is beautiful and virtuosic, and technically hardly to be believed, since I think Stetson records without overdubbing; I think everything going on, and there is a lot going on, is being played at one time.
To get the sounds he does, Stetson uses many microphones, both on himself and on the saxophones. In video of him playing track two, “The Six,” a bass saxophone piece, he has a mic on the bell of the sax, two mics, on stands, one on either side and in front; two small mics on the neck of the instrument, below his nostrils, and a contact mic on a strap around his neck, placed on his larynx. He uses the clapping of the saxophone keys as self-accompanying percussion.
One question I have is, when does Stetson take breaths? He seems to play without any pause. The bass sax, I assume, takes a ton of air to power, and add to that the breath, if any, needed for the vocalizations, and we’re talking cardio-pulmonary exertion at an athletic level. Can circular breathing explain how he does it? I encourage the reader to find out for themselves. “The Six” has quiet passages, where haunting echoes of an otherworldly voice float out over trembling saxophone tones, and heavy clapping sounds of the keys, which he knows how to do as an addition to his playing; it not just the clapping that goes with the keying of notes, but claps that do not align with changes in the pitch of the instrument. Roaring vocals come out over loud punctuating saxophone outbursts, moments of powerful slowness. I have read the vocals hurt when he performs them, and the overall impression I take from “The Six” is of the tortures of a monster.
Track three, “The Augur,” is a fast tenor-sax arpeggio like the title track, but short. It serves as a break between the heavier, key-percussion-laden tracks “The Six” and “Hollowing,” track four. The percussion really sounds more like drums than saxophone keys. The sound of the bass sax is raunchy, growling, at first, then breaks into an undulating, timbre-shifting wave train of low sounds. Stetson’s high-pitched keening soars over it.
“To think we knew from fear,” track five, is slow, a dirge-like march of a great beast or group of “rough beast[s]” making their way to Bethlehem to be born, as in “The Second Coming,” the great poem by William Butler Yeats. It is thick with bass sax growls and snarls, and the louder clapping of keys, over which is laid the vocal component.
Track six is perhaps my favorite yet, a fluttering, rising and falling arpeggio-flurry of notes with changing dynamics. We hear the nose-breathing of Stetson, I think. It sounds like a straw whisk-broom on a stone hearth. It is oddly named for being so beautiful, titled “Malediction” and not “Benediction”—a saying of evil wishes for someone? At any rate, Merriam-Webster Dictionary gives “curse” as a definition. It is curiously beautiful, I say again, for a curse. It sounds mournful when the groaning of the vocalizations come in.
I want to add that I do not say Stetson sings, but that he vocalizes, since the sounds do not sound fully human to my ear, but seem to be the wailing of a monster, perhaps a monster mourning its fate, that it is an outcast and a monster, cursed and hated. Could the curse in question not be the song, but be the life, the fate thrust upon it, of the tortured monster? Its life itself the curse, though it is not without beauty?
This album is long, a double-LP, though I listen to it on Qobuz. I will end my thoughts here, that this is a meditative album even during the most aggressive parts. As a philosopher wrote about art works, one important aspect of this art work is that it is at all. We are given it as if given a statement and an accompanying question. It is remarkable that it is at all, and I have raised questions about how it came to be. These questions could be answered by searching out interviews with Stetson, about his methods and techniques; but with only the art work before me, I am left with the pleasure of turning the answering of these questions over to my imagination. I find that far more satisfying than using a computer to find “the answer.”