It's definitely fascinating to hear musicians go through all the physical contortions they go through in creating music on their various instruments, each with its own peculiar timbre and technical taxonomy and physical demands that take years of research and development to allow a performer to reach sublime goals. We get evidence of a kind of sublimity on this trio recording on the Polish FSR label featuring Brad Barrett (double Bass, Cello, Effects), Joe Morris (guitar, effects) and Taylor Ho Bynum (double-belled cornet, Flugelhorn and pbone mini).
Perhaps as fascinating but much more puzzling is the kind of mental contortions musicians sometimes go through when titling their compositions. One thinks of tunes like Charlie Parker's "Card Board," or Charles Mingus' "All the Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother." Or this trio's Geologic Time, whose tracks are all titled after geological terms (like "Hadean Formations," "Proterozoic Dawn," and "Carboniferous Fern Forest," to name but a few). The premise, as outlined in the liner notes, is that the music presented here "mirrors the dynamic ebb and flow of time," and is "an auditory exploration of the fragile balance between creation and destruction, echoing the forces that sculpted Earth's geological history."
It is indeed a fascinating premise and whether the music suggested the titles or the titles the music is a moot point. Hearing the formations that arise from these articulate instrumental voices has without a doubt an effect comparable to observing the "evolutionary leaps and ecological shifts" which marks earth's history. And as "the geological time scale divides the history of the earth into periods of time that are characterized by evolutionary breakthroughs, distinct ecosystems and specific geological events" the liner notes say, so does the music evince principles of evolution, acoustical ecosystems and events. While musicians work in the world of sound, their instruments are physical, and part of the parallel gets expressed through the acoustical and electronic means used.
While not every listener will be fully convinced of the success of the parallels proposed, it is, nonetheless an enticing idea to suggest that correspondences between earth time and time as an element of musical composition are at play here.
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