If a suggestion may be offered-use the work in these pages as many chances to live between the extremes: within the Mish-Mash. Do not allow the seeming precariousness of all the balanced elements hold you back. It is the combination of subtle, profane, mundane, irrational, and sympathetic in these images that represents the real life “glue” through which we hold ourselves together. We can appreciate the purely simple and the purely complex, but we absolutely must live and hear and see in the wonderful combination of its combinations. That’s where we learn to be human. Luckily, an artist like Travassos provides us with all we need to begin.” Nate Wooley

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Can illustrations or graphics survive to the context for which they were created for? Yes, they can, as it is a wonderful example the book “Life is a Simple Mess”, by Travassos. What we can see in these pages was originally destined by its author for record covers released by the labels Clean Feed, Shhpuma, Sunnyside and Why Play Jazz or for the promotion of the music festival Rescaldo, of which he is the programmer, but here it all gains a second existence. Without the name of a musician or a group, without a title and without the logo of a discographic company on a specific album, each piece shows itself without the rationalizing caution of an imagetic translation of the impressions provoked by music. It’s like if the images free themselves not only from its purpose but also its cause, eventually finding in its inner force their justification and their significance, even considering the inherent undefinition in the effort not to determine our individual interpretations.

Travassos’ world sums – and usually on the same visual composition – elements from several sources. One of them is a reiterated naturalist perspective, with flowers and birds protagonizing a number of visions which transforms our reality in an alien fantasy, and that simply because the act of representation always result in a recriation (a modification) of the original. Another one offers us an understanding of the human figure owing everything to comics, and prefering a pop iconography to the centuries of Beaux-Arts’ body stylizations, though treated with a formal essentialism that plays with familiarity (a house is a house is a house) and not with strangeness, in a sort of minimalist conversion of surrealism.

Music doesn’t disappear completely from this visionaryism turned autonomous. The texts on the book never refer to it, but they were written by a musician, the trumpeter and free improviser Nate Wooley, and the invitation given to him says much about it. The publication is also complemented by music on CD, with a compilation of tracks, the most part of them unreleased, of bands having Travassos as a member in his parallel activity as sound artist, like Pão, Big Bold Back Bone and Pinkdraft. In consequence, “Life is a Simple Mess” leaves music to return to it. In the middle of that journey, the also manipulator of electronic audio devices finds his full identity as visual artist, a necessary condition to relate himself less obviously, less literally, with music. And that’s very, very interesting.

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This edition is a partnership between Chili Com Carne & Shhpuma

By Grego Applegate Edwards

The reason I make this preamble is that I, personally, have not yet found a good entry-point into electro-acoustic improvisation (often simply called EAI). While I’ve been exposed to a fair number of the genre’s respresentative recordings, there has been nothing to grab me and give me that “aha!” moment – that split second when everything falls into place and the sounds begin, little by little, to open up and make themselves known. Big Bold Back Bone’s debut on Clean Feed, In Search of the Emerging Species, while not explicitly an EAI record, has enough stylistic overlap with the genre to have been a cause for concern for me – would I have anything meaningful to say about it? Would it just be wind in my ear? In any case, I decided that the path to enjoyment had to start somewhere, and it may as well start here.

A quartet, Big Bold Back Bone features Marco von Orelli on trumpet and slide trumpet, Sheldon Suter on prepared drums, Luis Lopes on electric guitar and other objects, and Travassos on electronics. One thing to note when going into this recording, however, is that Big Bold Back Bone approach their instruments in the same way that I once heard Derek Bailey approached his guitar – as an alien artifact, a found object without context or connotation, a tool with which one could experiment freely. As such, the focus here is not on making “music” in the traditional sense of the word, but on exploring the sounds that can be constructed when a certain group of people come together at a certain time, in a certain room, with certain instruments and objects at their disposal. As the title suggests, In Search of the Exploring Species is an investigation of possibilities, a circuitous trek, rather than a direct route to some predetermined destination.

At an unbroken 43 minutes, it might be feared that the sole piece here, “Immerge,” is a slog to get through, but that’s not true at all. If anything, because of the lightness (volume-wise) of the textures and the relative lack of structured movement, it seems to speed by. It opens with a tentative series of knocks from Suter’s kit, some hard-to-pinpoint rubbery scrapes, von Orelli’s metallic gurgles, and the softly roiling static of Lopes’s electric guitar. Meanwhile, Travassos provides some high-pitched tones that, due to their relative faintness, fall somewhere between bird-song and the whine of drills. From this initial setting, deviations seem to occur in imperceptible waves – notably, von Orelli treats his trumpet as an open canvas of sorts, extracting all manner of timbres from its body: hollow sussurations, watery burbles, dry crackles. At some point, Suter moves from the more forceful pops and taps of the opening to cymbal-work that casts an uneasy shadow over the entire piece, and Travassos follows suit with cavernous electronics that open up the bottom and threaten to submerge everything. Lopes is ever-subtle, preferring to use his guitar as a textural device – from staticky drones to unsteady scrapes, he’s continuously in service of the overall tone of the piece. In fact, one of my abiding impressions of “Immerge” is that no single player seems to dominate the proceedings; in the spirit of the best free improvisation, the individual sounds bleed into each other, mixing and melding in ways that help to elevate the whole. Interestingly, the final ten minutes of the track find some of the musicians getting close to something that might be called “traditional music-making.” Lopes produces open notes that ring out with astounding clarity after the muffled drones of the preceding half-hour, and von Orelli emits a series of, well, trumpet-like tones. Suter engages in glacial, abstract percussion-work, and Travassos murmurs quietly in the background, a constant presence that never makes itself unduly felt.

By the time “Immerge” comes to a close, I feel that I have gotten ever closer to understanding the world of electro-acoustic improvisation – if I’m not yet putting every release from the Erstwhile label in my Discogs shopping cart, I’m at least considering the possibility. At a brisk 43 minutes, and with a variety of textures and sounds to keep your ears busy, In Search of the Exploring Species is a better place than any to get started on a new journey of musical enjoyment.
By Derek Stone