(file under: Ambient, Avantgarde, Contemporary Jazz, Noise)(file, cdr)

release date: 20 April 2007

Amazingly, Jair-Rôhm Parker Wells’ electro-acoustic experimental collection, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, is as arresting. Recorded at his Stockholm studio (the American bassist moved to Sweden in 1985), the hour-long recording finds the composer merging the recognizable sounds of bass improvisations (produced by a Fichter electric upright bass and Hohner HAB-1 acoustic bass guitar) with heavily-processed electronic manipulations that are considerably more abstract. A.L.M. opens the album explosively with shakers-like percussion sounds and sputtering electronics which bleed and belch over the rhythm base. The comparatively more conventional In Theory There is No Difference Between Theory and Practice, In Practice There Is is a breezy setting of laid-back jazz swing where the electric bass floats over a dense synthetic haze; fusion’ in the best sense of the word, the piece could be heard as a tribute to Weather Report circa Mysterious Traveler, with the fretless bass sound reminiscent of Pastorius and the synth solo of Zawinul. The piece shifts gears halfway through when the rhythm drops out, paving the way for a more explorative space where the bass solos amidst blurry electronic loops, whooshes, and assorted other noises. The processed guitars of Robert Musso and James Plotkin build a lulling drone behind Parker Wells’ lead on The Annexing of Jane. The album occasionally gravitates toward relatively placid territory during the languorous Sententia Africanus (for Karl-Heinz Stockhausen) and Lethal Beauty, and also includes two beautiful meditations for solo bass (Libido Management, Dangerous Curves and a Head) where Parker Wells’ technical command is showcased marvelously. The album transcends straightforward definition so handily that calling Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam a solo bass’ project is ridiculously inadequate especially when the genre-defying collection includes pieces like a twelve-minute black hole of writhing electronic wooziness (To Morning Sea Explore).

Jair Rohm Parker Wells – Dangerous Curves And A Head

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Jair Rohm Parker Wells – The Annexing Of Jane

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review:

With the dawning of synthetic science and the promise of technologies birthing from collaborative efforts across the whole scientific spectrum, optimists are calling the 21st century onwards the potential age of convergence. The crops of once isolated fields bordered off from one another are now relentlessly cross-pollinating, blurring into dizzying collaborative networks and shared information. And with the barriers between genres brought down in “AMDG” from electric bassist and experimenter Jair-Rohm Parker Wells, an atmosphere of convergency is prominent throughout this release, Klanggold’s second after “Pelktron” by Nobile. Slightly reminiscent of the free-squelch of Interface’s Cycling 74 release “./swank” (which, like AMDG, also features heavily treated electric basses), this vibrant, multi-genre amalgamation comes from his own “Sun Room” studio in Stockholm…and the fruits of the time and care an artist can spend in their own studio (rather than rushing between funds and compromising through self-consciousness in someone else’s) are apparent here. From the solitary down-and-out rubberiness of For Peace (Would You Hug A Suicide Bomber?) and Libido Management to the autopanning cosmic pulses of Setentia Africanus for Karlheinz Stockhausen (a fitting tribute to the late electronic magus), this is physical music, full of head-swimming drones and wibbly-wobbly sounds. Ah, the solitary rubberiness of Libido Management, after which we then take a voyage home to the blissful cetaceanism of The Annexing of Jane. The sounds of AMDG are physical also in the sense that Parker Wells has been -interfaced- with his music through his electric basses (which have been modelled on and resynthesised via processors both hardware and software) and some furious knob-twiddling, rather than letting a programme run and morph with the occasional intervention or the painstaking editing of sound libraries. Of course, that is not to say any technique is superior to another, rather, that Parker Wells’ methods are refreshing, as is his aforementioned usage of both hardware and software in a world of hardware vs. software. AMDG also returns us to a time when synthesisers spoke to one another, as with the agitated chop-chop and rapidly changing dynamics of Lethal Beauty, reminiscent of Ligeti’s “Artikulation” or the quieter moments of Kraftwerk’s “Von Himmel Hoch” with their conversational qualities. If you do not let the exotic lure of opener ALM’s first several minutes fool you into any misguided ideas of what the rest of the album is like and instead keep an open mind throughout, AMDG will provide a listening experience fitting for today’s early 21st century and it’s promises…
(Adam Davis 2010)