Stephen Gauci / Hans Tammen / Jeremy Carlstedt
Studio Sessions Vol. 11
Gaucimusic 11, recorded 2019, released 2020. Total Time 44:78 Minutes. Recorded by Trevor Schlam, mixed by Hans Tammen, mastered by Michael Coleman, produced by Stephen Gauci.
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This rough and tumble outing by comrades Gauci, Tammen, and Carlstedt comes about as a result of Brooklyn's musical cauldron known as the "Bushwick Series". Three improvising musicians, each performing with different bands on the same night, digging each other's music.."I sure could use some of THAT weirdness up in my stuff..". And so it begins, a match made in Bushwick. Buckle up!
John Sharpe / New York City Jazz Record December 2020
Tenor saxophonist Stephen Gauci’s running of the Monday night Bushwick Series has given him the opportunity to work with a range of other improvisers. This studio session, the product of alliances forged on stage in the basement of the Bushwick Public House, reunites him with drummer Jeremy Carlstedt and the electronics of Hans Tammen on a 46-minute digital download comprising six improvisations.
Gauci’s style is based on an idiosyncratic repertoire of overtone manipulation and multiphonics, mixed in with the occasional fragmentary jazzy phrase, which betrays his foundation in bop. He announces his intent right from the git-go with an unaccompanied foghorn blast, pure-toned squeals and reverberant overblowing to launch “Improvisation #1”. But his mates draw him into unfamiliar territories. Tammen plays the buchla synthesizer, trading in a litany of noise, beeps and drones, but also more steady repeated patterns, which mesh well with Carlstedt, whose predilection for a pulse supplies one of the dominant characteristics of this date, grounding Gauci’s flights and Tammen’s coloration.
As well as instigating some grooves — he and Tammen even fashion a backbeat during an extended duet on “Improvisation #2” — Carlstedt can serve as mediator, uniting the sometimes-contrasting approaches. That’s most obvious on “Improvisation #3”, when he first injects rhythmic figures into Tammen’s mesmeric rippling electric piano-like sonorities. Then as Gauci’s scuffled murmurs cut across the meter, the emphasis suddenly changes to a choppy tenor/drum tandem, before Carlstedt eases everyone back towards meter.
Gauci reaches for some of his most intense vocabulary on “Improvisation #5”, braying flurries separated by gutbucket honks, Carlstedt roiling and Tammen unleashing a fuzzy bass undercurrent, while volcanic “Improvisation #6” erupts in a final blowout. Though the setting might be new, the result is typically unconventional and uncompromising.
Original Link here.
Eyal Hareuveni / Salt Peanuts December 2020
American, Brooklyn-based tenor sax player Stephen Gauci began in March 2019 to document his free-improvised sessions with local, innovative musicians, among them pianists Cooper-Moore and Matthew Shipp, guitarists Joe Morris and Ava Mendoza, and double bass players William Parker and Michael Bisio. In June 2018 Gauci met for a «rough and tumble outing» two like-minded comrades – Hans Tammen who plays on the vintage analog synth, Buchla, and drummer Jeremy Carlstedt.
These three musicians performed with different bands on the same night at Brooklyn’s celebrated weekly, Monday Bushwick Improvised Music Series, curated by Gauci. Tammen, Carlstedt and Gauci liked what the other was doing and said: «I sure could use some of THAT weirdness up in my stuff…».
«Studio Sessions Vol. 11» delivers that weird promise. 45 minutes of restless and unconventional music, that moves freely from urgent, raw attacks to detailed timbral search. The dynamics differ in each of the six pieces. The trio begins with intense sax shouts, otherworldly bubbling sounds of the Buchla and energetic, free and fragmented drumming; moving to a more sparse and abstract piece, spiced with multiphonics and alien synth noises; contrasting the sax multiphonics and overtones with vintage beeps and powerful drumming; letting Carlstedt set a hypnotic rhythmic pattern on the following piece and ornamenting it with ecstatic sax playing and weird synth sounds; building on that powerful eruption and exploding on the fifth, most intense improvisation, and the short, final piece. Intense and addictive stuff.
Original Link here