Vaster Than Empires: Three Days

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About

Improvising trio Vaster Than Empires (Allen Otte, Erica Dicker, and Paul Schuette) formed in Cincinnati where Dicker and Schuette were pursuing doctoral work, and Otte had been a pivotal staple of the new music scene for decades as a member of Percussion Group Cincinnati. The byproduct of their collaboration has been several years of poignant, fresh improvised music informed by their collective experience in many genres of music making. This album chronicles the time they spent making music together during the summer of 2021 at Otte's home in the Ohio Valley.

Audio

# Audio Title/Composer(s) Time
Total Time 77:47
01Astral Crosswind
Astral Crosswind
18:46
02Seaward Galaxy
Seaward Galaxy
20:33
03Empyrean Tides
Empyrean Tides
19:03
04Upcoast Drift
Upcoast Drift
19:25

Vaster Than Empires (Allen Otte, percussion; Erica Dicker, violin; Paul Schuette, guitars) brings a focused intensity to their improvisational flights, morphing seamlessly between multi-dimensional textures in which the three players ebb and flow between primary and supportive roles. While the creation is spontaneous, the shared aesthetic between the three is apparent in their symbiotic sense of pacing, development, and structure.

The opening track, Astral Crosswind, opens with overlapping, cyclical phrases on pitched percussion, the sound of wind chimes heard through a distorting filter. Schuette enters imitating the repetitive/non-symmetrical nature of Otte’s phrasing with a morse code like figure outlining a tritone on distorted guitar while Dicker plays strident, glissando inflected lines in the high register. Otte returns with a storm surge of sound that washes inexorably over the texture before it blows over. This progression all happens within the first three minutes of the album, but the long lined evolution of the trio’s phrasing is indicative of their intuitive instinct for collective composition. The density of the opening gives way to a more spacious middle section with Dicker playing disembodied high sustained pitches while Otte plays disjunct flourishes on flower pots. Astral Crosswind ends in a dystopian haze, the kinetic energy of the beginning having faded away into poignant hybrid timbres.

The sounds in the initial minutes of Seaward Galaxy suggest foghorns, gulls, and the creaking of docks, though it’s not clear if the music or the title came first (likely the former…). The trio’s penchant for patiently allowing a compelling parameter to emerge as the primary element is evident as we hear electronics squealing emerge from the mix to the fore at the 2:40 mark. At 4:30 the trio returns to the undulating gestures of the opening, now accompanied by a pervasive, unsettling static. Dicker and Otte share a brief percolating acoustic duo before a bowed, multiphonic solo. An extended passage explores insistent regular rhythms on the triangle, and overtone based exploration on the violin. The piece closes with glitchy humor, each player delivering dry, prickly sounds that light up the mix like small sparks.

Empyrean Tides starts with the tambourine punctuating angular gestures on heavily distorted guitar. Dicker spars with skittering passagework, ascending to meet the increasingly high pitched electronics. We hear a kind of electronic bagpipe chorale as the electronics and violin meet on dripping double stops, as Otte colors the passage with turbulent rolls. A veiled, triumphant melody momentarily emerges through the maze of sound, a musical apparition?

The trio builds a wall of sound to open Upcoast Drift, featuring Schuette’s keen ear for variegated timbres. Otte adds gentle violence to the texture with brisk slapping sounds, before the music turns to an activated drone of sustained pedal points in the guitar and repeated chords in the violin. It takes time to really inhabit some musical ecosystems, and Vaster Than Empires is adept at gauging the ideal pacing for an idea to settle, evolve, and then develop and move on. This expansive space is extended with Dicker’s violin stepping forward with stuttering double stops over an open string pedal, before they disintegrate into Otte’s cultivated chaos. The next several minutes retreat to a similarly spacious exploration that we heard in Astral Crosswind, tightrope walking through delicate dialogue without the net of a strong ambient foundation. Though we hear all the players throughout this section, it is on the percussionist’s territory, with our attention drawn to subtleties in the timbre of attack, the shape of short rhythmic gestures, and the silences that surround them. The foundational drone reasserts itself for a closing coda, a final structural frame on a journey of fine variations in sound, gesture, and interaction, guided by the clear and palpable chemistry of these three improvisers.

- Dan Lippel


Reviews

5

Avant Music News

Vaster Than Empires is the improvising trio of Erica Dicker (violin and baritone violin); Allen Otte (percussion amplified soundboards and shortwave radio); and Paul Schuette (synthesizers and guitar). The four longish performances making up Three Days, which the three recorded in the summer of 2021, consist of spontaneously arrived at and texturally arranged constructions marked by variations in density and timbre. Collectively, the group’s sound tends toward a thick sonic impasto drawn from the harsher end of the audio spectrum. Dicker’s contributions on strings, for example, eschew melodic lines in favor of drones, thickly bowed chords, and the more elemental hues produced by extended techniques; her instrumental voice is appropriately complemented by Otte’s tension-filled percussive excursions and Schuette’s abstractions for guitar and synth.

— Daniel Barbiero, 6.05.2023

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