Second Room

Second Room

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Martin Taxt

Price

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Release date

2022-05-27

Catalog no.

SOFA588

Second Room is Taxt’s second album in a series of works investigating possible relations between music and architecture. In this work written for alto saxophone, two microtonal tubas, double bass, church organ, hand bells and modular synthesizers he is inspired by the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, and his ideas on different concepts of living.

In a lecture at the Harvard University in 2011, Fujimoto sets up a comparison between the nest and the cave, as two fundamentally different ways of living concepts. Whereas the nest represents safety, conformity and predictability, a space designed for people, the cave on the other side represents the unknown, a naturally shaped space, not designed for the purpose of living. It can be uncomfortable to enter the dark cave but spending time inside one can gradually start to adapt to the space. By rethinking our concept of space and the relation between space and human body we will eventually discover different functionalities within the cave and innovate new functions in the already designed space.

(…)A grid system with 36 pitches was the starting point of the composing process. Imagining the grid as a cave, I made 3 different paths through the grid as if I was exploring the cave. These three melodies became the outline for this composition. On ‘Disruption, disjunction, deconstruction’ the musicians are exploring the 36 pitches independently, as if, quoting Fujimoto; finding their own small favourite comfortable places inside the natural cave(…)

Martin Taxt – microtonal tuba, hand bells, composition
Rolf Erik Nystrøm – alto saxophone, hand bells
Laura Marie Rueslåtten – organ, hand bells
Inga Margrete Aas – double bass, hand bells
Peder Simonsen – microtonal tuba, hand bells, modular synthesizer

Reviews

Wire Magazine

Norwegian tubist Martin Taxt - a charter member of the microtonal tuba trio microtub - devised an ingenious compositional map for this superb new quintet recording. Drawing upon a lecture by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto in which he delineated the differences between a nest and a cave - calling the former a custom-made safe space and the latter a naturally designed space oblivious to needs of potential inhabitants - Taxt composed three related melodic paths for a 36 pithched grid to represent a cave. The agile musicians in his ensemble - fellow microtonal tuba player Peder Simonsen, bassist Inga Margrete Aas, reedist Rolf Erik Nystrøm and organist Laura Marie Rueslåtten - join him in his aural navigation of this organic space, tracing and elaborating his simple melodic shapes with a varied timbre one would hardly expect from an ensemble dominated by lower register instruments.

Indeed, the opening piece, Cave vs Nest, begins with a rumble of subterranean organ, resonant tuba and mewling modular synthesizer that feels like a tentative way of poking around in a new space, but as time passes the music opens, floating upon beating layers of sound that undulate like a magic carpet. The meditative veneer of "Swelling Forms of Domes" is heralded by the ringing of hand bells played by all five musicians here and there, claring the space for wind instruments, which toggle between chorale-like reverie and breakaway passages where one of the voices veers off to discover some other sonic nook before it's replaced by an asteroid spray of synthetic tones.

"Paving Seen from Above" drifts upon haunting electronic patterns, swooping whistles and massed bells, before the low end arrives as a soothing balm. For the final piece "Disruption, disjunction, deconstruction", the musicians embark on a group improvisation digging into the 36 pitches independently, but achieving a remarkable unity on what is the album's most varied journey.

Wire Magazine