Paul Flaherty has become a renowned figure in the past five years, a player equally regarded by free improv freaks, noise addicts, and fans of other niches of adventurous music. It’s a much deserved but somewhat serendipitous turn of events for the saxophonist, considering the decades that Flaherty toiled in relative obscurity, playing on the streets near his hometown of Manchester, CN, and painting houses during the day. Flaherty’s first solo release didn’t come into existence until 2003, in the form of the firestorm Voices, released on Flaherty’s own Wet Paint label. Voices was an aggressive work, featuring mostly uninterrupted squalls of high-intensity blowing, and serpentine, twisting tones. The album was impressive, but the chiefly singular mindset of Flaherty’s approach made it too much of a good thing, and Voices, despite all of its power, didn’t pack the punch that fans of Flaherty’s knew that it could.
Three years later, Whirl of Nothingness does what Voices didn’t. Flaherty, again in solo mode, still sends geysers of molten sound from the bell of his horn, but this time around, there’s more to his playing. His second solo effort is a much more varied one, featuring a more tempered Flaherty, and music that’s surprisingly melodic, sometimes even downright beautiful. That’s not to say that Flaherty’s gone soft; many of the disc’s prettiest parts are laced with a jagged edge, as melodious lines decay into ghostly wisps, or suddenly strangled and twisted into something wholly different. But one doesn’t get the sense that Flaherty’s sabotaging the disc’s more obvious bits pathos, Whirl of Nothingness is an unrepentantly emotional album, rife with cathartic expression. A soulfulness not usually so explicit in Flaherty’s work marks the disc in places, most notably in “Sweetly Danced in Times of Hurtful Pleasure,” in which a mournful melody slowly dissolves into tumultuous waters. “Firetrance Lonely Heartache Still” has at its core a somber tune, which Flaherty stretches it to its limits, but he repeatedly pulls back to the track’s chilling theme. In “Monsters Hide in Plain Sight Dark,” Flaherty pulls the reed from his mouth for a series of unnerving screams, the most overt expression possible of the emotion that fills the album’s music.
In the liner notes to the album, Flaherty discusses pain and suffering, and the inevitable descent of these albatrosses on everyone’s lives. Flaherty doesn’t pretend to have the answers, the panacea for the world’s suffering, but he is a believer in the healing powers of art and creation. Whirl of Nothingness is a powerful document, inspired by a need Flaherty felt to record an unexpected session of solo sax, saying “something or other wanted to get out.” It’s an album of emotional heft, straight from the heart, a window into the heart and mind of a man trying to play the pain away.
