This end-of-the-millennium quartet session probably best defines all the inherent contradictions in who ECM attracts to the label -- what kind of musician records for them -- and what concerns these artists and ECM's chief producer (and creator)
Manfred Eicher hold in common. This set, although clearly fronted by
Markus Stockhausen and
Arild Andersen on brass and bass, respectively, allows space for the entire quartet to inform its direction.
Héral and
Rypdal are not musicians who can play with just anybody; their distinctive styles and strengths often go against the grain of contemporary European jazz and improvised music. Of the 11 compositions here, four are collectively written, with two each by
Andersen and
Stockhausen. "Flower of the Now" uses space and texture to create a harmonic architecture, skeletal though it may be.
Stockhausen states a theme that acts as the syntax for the painterly drumming of
Héral and
Rypdal's interlocution between all the drifting parties. "Sway" begins with
Héral's trans-African drumming, followed by the fury of
Rypdal's own brand of guitar improvisation. He edges through musical frameworks of the past in rock, blues, and jazz, cutting them down in the process of playing knotty arpeggios and deconstructed riffs that rely on harmonic rather than lyrical language. When
Stockhausen moves into the fray, it's sparingly in stark contrast to
Rypdal's splatter and roll methodology and brings things to a near halt, with only
Andersen to slip a groove through the band's abstractions. This is a record of "sonics," an area not unlike the forbidden "Zone" filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's hero, who guides people through in the film Stalker -- forbidden, wasted, and beautifully desolate. When listeners reach the place in "Auma" where
Andersen's bass employs electronic devices to give it an "orchestra" or chamber section quality, they can hear how attentive this crew really is to one another. They move about slowly and purposefully in the musical spheres where sound, language, and harmonic monoliths all give way into something less definite, less shapely or contoured in favor of the unspeakable, the unmentionable, the inarticulate speech of the heart as it enters, through sound's language: one of tension, dynamic, nuance, and texture, the various places where spoken language fails so miserably. In all,
Karta is an effort that showcases the very best of its collective: It contains aesthetic grace and elegance as well as great violence and chaos. For all the recordings in "popular" music made at the end of the century, this is the one that sums up best where Western music has traveled these last hundred years, and points to just how far it yet needs to journey in the next thousand.
Karta is soulful, tender, and frightening. ~ Thom Jurek