One very strong impression that remained with me after listening to the duration of Sixty Interpretations of Sixty Seconds was that David Sait would make an excellent DJ. Perhaps that sounds like a trivial or flippant remark, but without that curator’s clever and highly musical sequencing and keen sense of timing, this project—or any project of its kind, for that matter—could have easily ended up a complete and utter mess, despite the uniformly high quality throughout.
Over its span, the compilation encompasses numerous broad ranges: improvisational approaches, instrumental timbres, geography, levels of notoriety. Sait’s finely attuned ears have rendered these differences palatable, deliciously shattering, or even temporarily imperceptible, by slyly weaving together common threads between each submission or juxtaposing them in an artful manner. The result is a thoroughly digestible, engaging, and cohesive, yet endlessly varied, whole.
That is not to say that the sixty individual contributions are flattened by Sait’s Larry Levan-like ear for interleaving the cuts. Christine Sehnaoui’s peculiar improvisation on alto sax huffs and wheezes like the lungs of an asthmatic robot. Sait’s own piece on the Guzheng is akin to the lean and highly innovative kayagum vocabulary of Byungki Hwang, but inflected with some of Alice Coltrane’s psychedelic harp sweeps. Torontonian Joe Sorbara’s drums-and-percussion solo trickles like heavy, quantized rainfall. Ignatz’s low-fi, forlorn half-song is a welcome surprise, as is Todd Taylor’s virtuostic bluegrass-banjo barrage that closes the opening section. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Helena Gough’s elusive field recording offers a continuous and sputteringly fricative texture, which is deftly truncated by Leonel Kaplan’s sparse and breathy trumpet shapes. Alessandro Alessandroni’s sweetly maudlin bit takes a wilfully hokey ersatz Rhodes piano and glazes it with a whistled tune.
This disc is, without question, worth investigating, simply on the grounds that it executes such an outlandish idea with such panache, while also presenting some intriguing and well-founded challenges to the definition of so-called improvised music.
Nick Storring is a Toronto-based composer, musician, and writer, and a contributing editor to Musicworks. His music has been presented and performed by the Esprit Orchestra, Eve Egoyan, Quatuor Bozzini, Beijing’s Musicacoustica Festival, and Vancouver New Music. An avid collaborator, Storring has composed for films by Terrance Odette, Ingrid Veninger and, in collaboration with Dafydd Hughes, for the National Film Board’s award-winning Web documentary High Rise: Universe Within (2015), directed by Katerina Cizek. He’s also scored productions by Litmus Theatre and MT Space, worked with celebrated choreographers Yvonne Ng, Marie Josée Chartier, Brandy Leary, and Deepti Gupta, and created music for “ambient gaming environment” Tentacle, which was mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2011. Storring’s writing has appeared in Exclaim!, The Wire, and AUX.tv. He also contributed liner notes to Alga Marghen’s reissue of the ’60s band Intersystems’ entire recorded output, as well as RVNG Intl.’s box of early psych trio Syrinx’s reissues and previously unreleased material Tumblers from the Vault.