In recent years Paradox Tilburg has been the spot to experience experimental and avant-garde music in an intimate setting on the Friday and Saturday of Roadburn. For the fourth year running, we’ve teamed up with this special, world-renowned jazz club to bring you: 40 Watt Sun (solo), Angles 9 – Death of Kalypso, Early Life Forms, Heavy Jazz Jam – hosted by Theo Holsheimer, ILL Considered & Under the Reefs Orchestra.
40 WATT SUN SOLO (UK)
Many pilgrims here at Roadburn have witnessed the stages of Patrick Walker’s artistic skin shedding: from his doom metal days with Warning to the dirgeful melancholy and majesty of current longtime recording project 40 Watt Sun, with whom he released the latest LP Little Weight just last year. Walker’s voice is an entity that’s pretty damn hard to express in feeble words: resonant enough to brand your soul for life, yet tender enough to be considered a serenade of sorts. His slower-paced method in writing songs is remarkably urgent: a potent means for him to lean fully into the moment, the conviction behind what he’s singing about, and the next note about to be played. The result is music you don’t just listen to, but something that folds you completely into its obsidian firmanents.
ANGLES - THE DEATH OF KALYPSO (NO)
Swedish sax player Martin Küchen has consistently been one of most unconventional figures in freejazz, performing with ensembles like Tresspass Trio and All Included. That being said, The Death of Kalypso, the latest conceptual venture from his other consistent project Angles, is a whole new level of ‘out there’. And considering Küchen’s consistently unruly output, that’s saying something. The Death of Kalypso is – wait for it – a free jazz opera (!) for our times: a macabre and tumultuous socio-political performance where Küchen joins forces with pianist Alexander Zethson and vocalist Elle-Kari Sander to conduct a 8-piece ensemble that could perhaps be described as a free-jazz answer to Hieronymus Bosch’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels: a sprawling, orchestral piece that uses both the opulent resplendency of the divine and the faults and vices of the earthbound as stepping stones.
The white-clad Sander takes center stage as an almost arcane soliloquist tying the immensehood of it all together. The Death of Kalypso is definitely a listening experience unlike anything – if only to find that something of such scope and ambition can be matched by equal amounts of playfulness and mischief. Line up orchestra is Elle-Kari Sander (voice), Martin Küchen (saxophone), Mats Äleklint (trombone), Jasmijn Lootens (cello), Mattias Ståhl (vibraphone), Alex Zethson (piano keyboards), Johan Berthling (double bass) and Konrad Agnas (drums).
UNDER THE REEFS ORCHESTRA (BE)
It’s quite incredible what a mutual love for Moondog, Jim O’ Rourke, French chamber music from the 19th century can amount to these days. As a result, Brussels’ adventurous Under The Reefs Orchestra have become a bombshell affair. One second their music sounds like some otherworldly prog jazz incursion, the next, their music dissolves into a hypnotic ambience. They also have an uncanny nose for catchy, cinematic melodies that sound like they could come from a vintage spy thriller. Under the Reefs Orchestra is comprised of guitarist Clément Nourry, saxophonist Marti Melia and drummer Jakob Warmenbo – as a trio they somehow manage to live up to the ‘orchestra’ part of the equation, managing to sound way bigger and texturally rich than the sum of their parts. Under The Reefs Orchestra’s music isn’t a social commentary, but more a freewheeling escape – dropping terms like ‘divine’ and ‘apocalyptic’ in the same sentence should tell you a thing about the fabulist ways these guys sweep listeners off their feet.
Sometimes the trio sounds harsh and treacherous, like vast clusters of volcanic rock, but their music can be equally weightless and open, as if floating in a body of water over a lagoon. But there’s always something hot simmering beneath the surface, about to burst through.
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