Review Summary: sound majestic in its bareness
Wind instruments usually work like this: you blow air through a piece of something (skin, muscle, plastic, wood, whatever) that makes the air that goes through it vibrate in a specific way to create a tone. This makes wind instruments sound way closer to animal and human voices than, let’s say, a guitar.
Wind instruments, therefore, can provoke or bring to the surface a range of emotions in ways practically impossible to achieve for other instruments. They can be as sweet and peaceful as birds singing after a summer storm, or as brutal as to mimic a man’s screams of agony (see: Death Whistles).
This ‘almost like it’s alive-but not quite’ vibe gives them quite the eerieness to them but also a certain majesty, like an otherworldly origin. They are not bounded to earth. they, like the birds, come from above.
So when I first listened to Palace of Wind, first album from New York band Battle Trance, i felt this otherworldly-ness in the form of majesty… A sense of cosmic drama, like a ritual about to be performed.
The various sections that compose the 3 main movements of the piece all fall into very short and simple structures of variation and repetition that derive into complex micro-patterns which create this very architectural soundscape, like something from Steve Reicht or late-era Coltrane.
The 4 tenor saxophones, constantly going up and down and playing fractal games off each other in a continuous upward movement, reminiscence the ominous humming of an orchestra tuning up before a concert or, more symbolically, a celestial army getting ready for battle.
With few hard-hitting solo moments strategically emplaced, the tones, textures and timbres of the 4 tenor saxophones are the simple but solid building materials with which the band creates this complex, grand, mantra-like Palace of Wind.
