CHRIS ABRAHAMS/OREN AMBARCHI/ROBBIE AVENAIM - PLACELESSNESS
This collaboration between Chris
Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim brings together three of Australia’s
most innovative experimental musicians. Although Ambarchi is now based overseas, the trio's improvisatory practice retains a collective identity. This
is an artistic interaction developed through years of friendship and enhanced
by each musician’s refinement of his own methodology. The grounding of this
practice and the open-endedness of the music generates an intriguing tension, a
simultaneous augmentation and contradiction of the title’s semiotic chain of meaning.
Placelessness is a term coined by
Canadian geographer Edward Relph in the 1970s to describe the erosion of individuality
of place under modernity. Capitalist imperatives (commercialisation, mass
consumption) and bureaucratic standardisation instil homogeneity in the
cultural environment. A companion concept in the field of anthropology,
describing a similar form of alienation, is the non-place. Marc Augé,
in his book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity,
defines a non-place as “a space which cannot be defined as relational, or
historical, or concerned with identity.” Such spaces include railway stations
and department stores, supermarkets and enclosed ATM facilities, aircraft and airport
terminals. Some – the last two in particular - are regular haunts of the
touring musician.
Released in September 2023
through Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ imprint, Placelessness was recorded
in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney between 2017 and 2022. A single, 40-minute
work, straddling the stylistic worlds of ambient, minimalism, free
improvisation, and machine music, was adjusted and split into two pieces, ‘Placelessness
I’ and ‘Placelessness II’, for LP release. Brian Eno’s Music for Airports
suggests itself as inspiration and spiritual ancestor. Despite its surface
placidity, Eno failed in his bid to get his ambient piece used as a replacement
for muzak in its intended location; Placelessness doesn’t exactly suggest
background music capable of putting passengers at ease, either. That’s not to
say it’s entirely harsh or disturbing in tone: for all its unsettling passages,
there are satisfying moments of convergence and harmony, but there’s nothing
soporific about the aesthetic or state of mind it conjures.
If familiarity is calming, then Placelessness deserves shelf space with Eno’s most contemplative works. Those with even a passing knowledge of these musicians’ extensive discographies will recognise their respective techniques and approaches from the first seconds of ‘Placelessness I’. Abrahams opens with his distinctive touch on piano: delicate phrasing and arpeggiated inversions evoking mystery and exploration; it’s a style he has bedded in with his solo work and his long-running minimalist jazz trio The Necks. Robbie Avenaim’s contribution as percussionist with his SARPS (Semi Automated Robotic Percussion System), a series of robotic and kinetic extensions to his drum kit, is decidedly sparse and lowercase at first, but gradually acquires more significant granularity. Ambarchi provides a crucial solidifying role in this textural triangle with one of his trademark touches: those droning feedback loops between guitar and tabletop electronics that stealthily effloresce into exotic sonics touching the numinous. He’s been developing this approach for some time, notably with landmark works like Knots and the Ghosted trio formation with Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin. When the interplay between Ambarchi’s tonal abstraction and Abrahams’ wandering arpeggios intensifies, it brings on a sense of quickening; of accelerated history invading supposedly ahistorical spaces.
The notion of Utopia would seem
to represent the ultimate non-place: the Greek meaning for the term Sir Thomas
More used in 1516 to describe his imaginary ideal society is literally ‘no
place’. Interestingly, Augé describes the non-place as the inverse of utopia, due
to its lack of “organic society”, but also suggests it can be a site of
resistance to Empire (the neoliberal late capitalist order). The targeting of
these areas by terrorists is one negative example; but even within the
non-place’s cultivation of solitude and identity loss unorthodox ideas can
grow. What dreams populate the distracted traveller’s mind as he or she gazes out the
window on long flights or waits in airport lounges? Could they dwell
somewhere between the plethora of concerns about positioning in the socioeconomic order, news reports about ongoing environmental
catastrophe, and the desire for escape into a better state of being?
Paul Mason, in his book Postcapitalism:
A Guide to Our Future, suggests that our current age of info-capitalism and
the digital economy is gradually dissolving the connection between labour and value as
it obscures thresholds between work and leisure, giving rise to the possibility of
a post-capitalist economy based on sharing and collaboration. He argues that
this transition is not only desirable as social justice
after decades of wage stagnation, but a necessary transformation to deal with
climate change. "We lie at a moment of possibility: of a controlled
transition beyond the free market, beyond carbon, beyond compulsory work."
Placelessness takes on another nuance of utopian meaning here, suggesting economic
liminality, definancialization and social liberation, borderless duties of
ecological care.
Music is an economy of elements
engaged in sustainable interaction. The interplay between Abrahams, Ambarchi
and Avenaim suggests the “networked, modular, non-linear teamwork” Mason says will
drive the transition to post-capitalism. Such teams apply collaborative
thinking to old processes: Avenaim’s SARPS percussion creates a mechanical
blast beat effect at one particularly thick section of ‘Placelessness II’; it’s
like hearing the most rigorously posthuman metal drumming. His hand-held cymbal
rolls at a later point in that piece – possessing a technical precision that
rivals his machine counterparts - suggests the sounds emanating from some futuristic
steelworks; or perhaps one that’s fading into history. The trio’s individual practices
have an inherently modular quality, endlessly capable of being realigned and integrated
into new configurations free of hierarchy. When they lock in together
seamlessly, you can feel the ground moving underneath you.
The SARPS percussion raises the
spectre of artificial intelligence. Mason argues the universal basic income
necessary to support a society made jobless by automation is only affordable
through wholesale economic transformation. More
cynical readers will question how tenuous and contingent his
projected post-capitalist economy will be given the amount of political will necessary to overcome entrenched interests. Fittingly perhaps,
‘Placelessness II’ ends after an extended euphoric passage in fits and starts,
Abrahams’ thrummed piano clusters gradually sputtering to a close: a dream left
suspended in its own aura of potentiality.
There’s nothing didactic about an
instrumental album like Placelessness, but the rich ambiguity of its moods reflect contemporary dilemmas and conjure contrasting states: the alienated solitude of the non-place, and in
response, the collectively unconscious desire for radical, borderless change.
In its darker strains, the consequences of inaction, of not making the transition
to more environmentally and socially sustainable systems of living, are also palpable.
The virtues of friendship and collaboration, the necessity of making these
qualities a dominant feature not only of art but of everyday life, stand as
guardian values capable of forestalling all the vast, deteriorating non-places
of the future. This is world-class improv that comes with a triple A rating. Let it find a place in your ears.
Text (C) Copyright 2024 by Jon Kromka
Placelessness is out through Ideologic Organ and available from Bandcamp:
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