CD – Nakama

The encounter between the Malaysian Goh Lee Kwang (a nylon guitar specialist) and the Norwegian Christian Meaas Svendsen (a talented jazz bass player) was really unconventional. The producer label Nakama Records organized the meeting that took place in Minut Init Art Social, an independent art gallery near Kuala Lumpur. The goal is the clash and the coexistence of two different approaches and musical languages, two different geographical origins and generations. Behind the project was the awareness that the uncertainty of this relationship may originate a musical interpenetration, whose cross-breeds would be coherent and sensitive. We don’t know if in the first track, “Gibberish”, the reference to sannyasi meditation of the same name (a practice to escape from an active mind) was really wanted. It seems a kind of liberating present tense made of nonsense sound emissions and concatenations of improper or usually not considered languages. Beginning with this suggestion, the recordings (taken on direct connection and with a portable device) seem quite nervous, often dissonant and with a poor attitude to searching for a syntony. In our opinion, this is the first step the artists take to move out of their own self-awareness and reject their personal obsessions, their crystallized styles and their own comfort zone. In “Balderdash” the weaves seem more meditative, but the attitude to highlight the senseless aspect of these musical progressions is always the same, as in “Drivel”. According to the authors, the last track is the best, thanks to its “reserved and poetic” spirit. Trying to search for some coherent narration among the cuts is meaningless: this was not the goal of the two musicians, who aimed to unravel themselves between many elements, details, hints and shadows, more or less insisting expressiveness and contortionist knowledge. They don’t give in to temptation to create some sophisticated structures that would be some theoretical or interpretative covers. Sound fragments pile up in the work and someone may object that these are simply interpretation processes, typical of the more complicated and conceptual expressions of jazz. But a broader breath crosses the three jam-sessions and the correspondences arising seem to be launched from the very intimate refuse of ordinary musical structures.

 

Goh Lee Kwang & Christian Meaas Svendsen ‎– Gibberish, Balderdash And Drivel