Hat Melter - Unknown Album
(Crouton)
The idea of surprise and fresh ideas is one that's always been important with respect to improvised music. However, as with any other style of music, improvised music has spawned its own array of cliched techniques and tired tricks. Some musicians, such as AMM's Keith Rowe, who professes a fear of his guitar, strive to keep their music fresh and ever-evolving, but many other improvisers, even some of the best, allow themselves to find a comfortable place and stagnate there. Hat Melter, an quartet of cellos and percussion, have taken an extra step on their new LP, Unknown Album, to ensure that the sounds of their improv remain new, both to the listener, and, more impressively, themselves.
Cellists Jeff Klatt and Matt Turner, along with percussionists Steve Hess and Jon Mueller, began the creation of Unknown Album by improvising live. Klatt and Turner made ample use of the cello's myriad improvisational possibilities, while Hess and Mueller's extended percussion technique went so far as to include the sounds of styrofoam through fan blades. The resulting music was taken back to the studio, and rearranged completely. This gives Unknown Album the feel of something entirely different than your normal improv album. Small snippets of sound and silence are interspersed over two side-long pieces, and though it's possible to notice clues as to the sounds' origins, the uninformed listener would most likely be hard pressed to correctly identify some of what sounds like a digitized insect buzz as a cello, or a tinny scrape as the sound of a stick on a cymbal. The music on Unknown Album is often quite alien, even when the cellos, drums, and cymbals are more easily recognized.
The first side of the LP begins with sparse, truncated sounds, slowly augmented by a quiet din until the sounds of cymbals and drumsticks make their first obvious entrances over the to-and-fro waves of cello stitched together below. The second side begins on a much more subtle tone, with distant sounds and plenty of empty space. Quickly growing into a resonant ring, the music ends suddenly and picks up again in territory similar to that of the first side's beginnings. What follows is a crescendo and recession of what could easily be a long series of extended technique improv, and the obvious cut-and-paste properties of the music are minimized over much of the remainder of the LP. This is a double-edged sword, as the collage effect of the music begins to lose its novelty over time, but the more "straightforward" segments of composite music don't have the same original sound. Either way, in a limited, hand-numbered edition of 300 and on 220 gram vinyl, Unknown Album is probably worth the money you'll spend. It's virtually guaranteed that you won't hear another improv album quite like it in the near future.
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