Mark Cunningham has kept busy since the dissolution of Mars in 1978, but he’s not likely to fully escape that shadow of band who played less than 25 shows in a short lifetime in Manhattan. He helped with fellow Martian Sumner Crane’s wonderfully bizarre John Gavanti project, and played in Don King for six years, though there’s precious little in existence as far as evidence. Cunningham relocated to Barcelona in 1991, releasing a solo disc, and forming the collaborative relationships that resulted in Raeo and Convolution. Late in Don King’s lifespan, Cunningham had begun to experiment with the use of effects on his trumpet, an approach that’s since become a hallmark of Cunningham’s sound. Aleatory Grammar, his duo with Danish composer Jakob Draminsky Højmark, finds Cunningham running live trumpet through Korg’s Kaoss II Pad, with Draminsky using a laptop to recontextualize a corral of acoustic samples in real time. ABCEDminded is the duo’s second release, following a self-titled release in 2004.
ABCEDminded takes its title from an excerpt of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, but isn’t as twisted as its namesake. Underneath the cool digital veneer of the music, Draminsky focuses on the repetition of minor events as rhythmic structure, recasting his acoustic output on wind or string instruments as mechanical pulses. Cunningham’s sound depends largely on the effect through which his trumpet is strained, ranging from subtly inorganic to completely synthetic. At times, the transformations are so absolute that Cunningham might as well be playing a synthesizer, but it’s when his natural tone mingles more prominently with the effect in which it’s bathed that Cunningham’s alterations are at their most interesting. When ABCEDminded becomes more transparent, one can hear the life in Aleatory Grammar’s music, like toy soldiers come alive, ordinary things behaving in new ways. Too often, musicians who use interesting samples and manipulation of instruments become bogged down in the process of transforming them, and frequently lapse into normalcy, to the point where the sound sources mean nothing if they’re making the usual electronic sounds. Aleatory Grammar aren’t always able to avoid this pitfall, but, when they do, the results can be exciting.
