Larry Ochs & Gerald Cleaver - Songs of the Wild Cave (ROGUEART 2018)

In 2016, Gerald Cleaver and Larry Ochs are led, with the help of aficionados, to the depths of a cave frequented by men and women in the Paleolithic. Several engravings with mysterious meanings, various paintings saved from the years, signal their passage. This place resonates, not only in the acoustic sense, but in the (pre)historical and spiritual sense as well. As they descend, the air grows heavier, all the more thickened by a palpable past that it becomes poorer in oxygen. 

This place is to be respected and pledged allegiance to. Then comes the time to be adopted by it. They make a few sounds, tentatively at first. Then brief clapping duos. The cave speaks, answers them, they can feel it. A few hours away, in another cave, that they are getting ready to record, for the first time in the world, a free improvisation session in the heart of a prehistoric cave in the southwest of France does not cross their mind.

What Eurydice did they come looking for in this place? The answer, seemingly trite, could fit in a single word: interaction. Let us be clear, however: an unprecedented, unimaginable, and unimagined interaction. As the nerve center of free improvisation, interaction is not limited to the sole sound traces of the dialogue between musicians. Its action thrives on the place of production, the listeners in attendance (or absent, or virtual), takes into account the weather or the ambient sounds…

This place instills, at best inspires. Some more than others, depending on their depth. From this point of view, the Gerald Cleaver-Larry Ochs duo in this cave consists indeed in a dialogue between three entities. First through silence. True silence. Not the artificial, absolute silence, but an inhabited silence, absent-present (magnificently rendered by Vincent Mahey’s remarkable recording). Seven times did the musicians probe its qualities, always with a different result: engraving the silence in its folds, piercing attempts, appearance-disappearance… 

The space of the place also conditions the musicians’ (re)actions. On their sounds, the cave reflects. They answer. It objects or responds. They converge. Thus the situation necessarily leads the musicians to play differently because they hear themselves differently. The density of the past matters as well. Fantasizing the music played in this place charged with millennia of history, attempting to comprehend its multiple manifestations, fuels Gerald Cleaver’ and Larry Ochs’s imagination as a result. Guttural sounds, rhythms that seem shamanic, trance effects, ingenuity found anew in the discovery of sound, etc.: all of them ancestral gestures and attitudes driven by an inaccessible yet immanent past. If a given time, long past, has consequences on musical creation in the moment, the absence of another type of time, that which passes with the tick of the clock, is also in full effect.

It is a well-known experience: for man, to venture in the bowels of the earth entails experiencing time stretching, diluting even. There is therefore no point in projecting oneself towards a precise point in time. If the moment then increases in intensity, the passage of one’s life story in the flow of time loses its tragic. Much like this absence of “final cause”, the tensions generated in Gerald Cleaver’ and Larry Ochs’s improvisations therefore have value for and in themselves, and not with a view to resolving them.

With these two Orpheus, we do not descend to Hell, but ascend to Paradise. Produced outside of the world of the livings, the Eurydice they leave to us are the reflections of their quest: immemorial, timeless. 

Larry Ochs: tenor and sopranino saxophones 

Gerald Cleaver: drums, percussion

1. First Steps 9:05

2. Into The Air 5:16

3. Deeper 9:52

4. Down 5:46

5. Ringing It In 7:07

6. Rooted in Clay 8:59

7. Light From The Shadows 14:35

All pieces co-created by Gerald Cleaver (Gerald Cleaver Music / SESAC) and Larry Ochs (Trobar / ASCAP / admin. BMG)

Recorded by Vincent Mahey (assistant: Morgan Beaulieu) on October 1st 2016 in the southwest of France, in a wild cave in absolute silence and darkness.

Mixing: Vincent Mahey

Mastering: Raphaël Jonin

Liner notes: Ludovic Florin

Photograph: Alban Jacques

Cover design: Max Schoendorff

Cover realization: David Bourguignon

Executive producer: Michel Dorbon