December 20, 2024
Echolalia - Giovanni Di Domenico with Alexandra Grimal & Eric Thielemans
Label: W.E.R.F.
Catalog #: W.E.R.F. 230
Location: Bruges, Belgium
Release Date: December 6, 2024
Media: vinyl or digital download
bandcamp.com entry
discogs.com entry
Echolalia is the new album by Belgian pianist, Giovanni Di Domenico. Side A of the lp runs continuously for 26 minutes. On the first fourteen minutes, Di Domenico is accompanied by French saxophonist, Alexandra Grimal, and on the last twelve by Belgian drummer, Eric Thielemans. Side B continues the piano/drums duet. To our ear it sounds like a composition with a healthy allowance for improvisation. It is ear-friendly music, in which the most egregious elements of dissonance are absent, while at the same time a listener cannot claim that a consistent melody permeates the piece. The music has taken a measured path through the borderlands between composition and improvisation, melody and dissonace.
Since our first encounters with Alexandra Grimal (courtesy of collaborations with Tyshawn Sorey and Joëlle Léandre), we have eagerly followed her musical adventures. As we repeatedly note in these reviews, discovering a musician whose music we enjoy and whose musical collaborations lead us to discover new voices is a twin delight of improvised music. It was through Grimal's music that we were first introduced to the piano of Giovanni Di Domenico. Their fourteen minutes shared on Echolalia is a pleasant, mellow quarter hour that disappears too quickly. We found ourselves wishing for more.
Echolalia is defined as "meaningless repetition of words just spoken by another person, occurring as a symptom of mental conditions". Thus we are not inclined to impose any special message on the album other than that implied by the title and reinforced by the music itself. The pieces themselves are named after the three Boeotian muses, sisters called Aoede, Melete and Mneme. All very nice.
With reference to the musicians, we have a limited exposure to Giovanni Di Domenico. We know his music from five previous collaborations with Alexandra Grimal. (A few favorites include the piano/saxophone duets Chergui and Down the Hill as well as the larger Dream and Drone Orchestra.) We also know that Di Domenico is a prolific musician with a vast and changing network of collaborators, but our knowledge of this repertoire is limited, though we did enjoy his live show earlier this month in a trio with Keiji Haino and drummer Tatsuhisa Yamamoto. Di Domenico plays a variety of instruments on Echolalia, including piano, electronic keyboards and pipe organ. The music is apparently culled from two distinct live performances, both from 2023. We enjoyed the whole album, but the music on side A lodged in our memory to a greater extent.
As for the drumming of Eric Theilemans, this album serves as almost our first introduction to his playing. We say almost because—in what seems a rather unusual coincidence—we also enjoyed a duo show that he performed with Keiji Haino last month. On Echolalia, Theilemans' drumming meshed perfectly with Di Domenico. The irregular, stuttering rhythms keep flawless time with the piano. It made us think of the statement, "The instrumentation is the composition already, you've scored it just by showing up and bringing people together who know what one another's capabilities are." [Clifford Allen, published in Singularity Codex: Matthew Shipp on RogueArt, RogueArt, Paris, France, 2023, p. 40.]
To top it off, usually we are pretty indifferent to album cover art, but we especially appreciated the color and texture of the cover to Echolalia. It was created by Miquel Casaponsa.
The staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House had been delaying adding the final entry to the annual Top Ten Albums list at the PPPH house. With the arrival of Echolalia, we delay no longer and the 2024 list is complete.
Echolalia served as our introduction to the W.E.R.F. label out of Bruges, Belgium. For those interested, W.E.R.F. is an acronym for Wasted Energy Record Factory. The name of this label brings to mind two quotes. The first is from the late German saxophonist, Peter Brötzmann (March 6, 1941 - June 22, 2023).
After over thirty years, it may look and sound a little bit
different, but in the end, I think my inspiration still comes from the
same place. When I was a young man, I thought I could change the
world. I was angry. And now, after all of these years and all that we
may have done to try and make things better, it has done nothing! We
are just as foolish as we have always been. But that shouldn’t be a
resignation. We have reason to be optimistic and we must try to make
a difference.
—Peter Brötzmann
from Music and the Creative Spirit: Innovators in Jazz, Improvisation and the Avant-Garde by Lloyd Peterson,
Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Maryland, 2006, p. 33.
The second quote is from French percussionist, Lê Quan Ninh (b. 1961).
After every performance, I might as well throw up my hands and shout: "Still nothing!!"...Maybe just the amount of time that passed, a time that lacks the quality of assault or fading away, a simple stretch of collective lived time that gets melded with my perception. So what exactly was I doing during all that time, with sounds? What took hold of me that in turn made me use them, make them appear, state them aloud, and then leave them behind in nothingness? What persuaded me to choose such an unproductive, useless activity?
—Lê Quan Ninh
Improvising Freely: The ABC's of an Experience, trans. Karen Houle, PS Guelph, 2014, p. 63.
If only all energy was so well wasted!
personnel:
- Giovanni Di Domenico (pianos, Fender Rhodes, synthesizers and pipe organ)
- Alexandra Grimal (soprano saxophone on Track I)
- Eric Thielemans (drums on Track II & III)
