Artist Name: Rob Mazurek
Nationality: American
Occupation: Composer, improviser, trumpet/cornet player
Release: Rob Mazurek teams up with Matt Lux (electric bass) and Mikel Patrick Avery (organ) for Alternate Moon Cycles, out via International Anthem. The album was recorded December 17th, 2012, at Curio, Chicago, and originally released as the first International Anthem LP in 2014. It is now being made available on vinyl again, as well as a digital edition coming with the 20-minute bonus track “The Tree of Life.” Order it from bandcamp.
Review by: Tobias Fischer interviewing himself

This interview review is part of 15 Questions's project of finding new, more engaging formats for the review format.



So the way I understand it, Alternate Moon Cycles is a bit of an unusual entry in Rob Mazurek's extensive discography. It's essentially a drone record, yes?

I suppose one could call it that.

For the most part, the music on this release is centred around a single note – a “c” on side a and an “f” on side b – and playing that single note for as long as possible.

That's not a lot of material to work with.

No, but the appeal of the music derives from the way the musicians are playing:

Mikel Patrick Avery's organ has a suspended presence, a soft, swelling and ebbing electrical hum which takes on a similar role as a tanpura in Indian classical music. In fact, it even sounds very much like a tanpura. Mazurek mirrors the organ in playing sustained tones on his cornet which grow gradually longer as the piece develops, building up to almost half a minute at the apex point of the first side before slowly receding to shorter durations.

Matt Lux', on the other hand, actually plays a rhythm on his electric bass, a slow pulse, occasionally leaping up an octave before plunging back down into deep, warm resonance.

These three events continue for the entire duration of the music. But because not a single one of them is ever exactly the same and because they keep shifting against each other, the effect is utterly mesmerising, creating a meditative mood.

So, despite the somewhat unusual instrumentation – it's a drone piece.

On the surface of it, especially side 2 definitely seems to fall into this category. Here, the sounds blur and billow a bit more in the lower registers. It creates this woozy, time-arresting sensation, it's more of a whispering cloud than an ensemble of clearly separated instrumental lines.

But on the other hand, you can still make out the individual players here. There's not a single moment where their contributions blend into something beyond their control or distil into an unmoving, steady state, which are qualities I usually associate with the most typical drone works.

I see Alternate Moon Cycles rather as a work of minimalism, although I suspect that Mazurek would probably prefer not even to label it as that. The process is one of taking a very simple idea and then exploring its potential. As he told me when I spoke to him about his São Paulo Underground colaboration: “It is always exciting to know that there are possibilities in everything. All Material. It is possible to transform a whole tone scale, a brown shoe, the blue sky or a rollercoaster.” In this particular case, the material is: “Play just one note.”

And to me, despite your scepticism, the results are not just beautiful, dreamy, and tranquil – they are actually exciting. In fact – and this may be partly due to the fact that the label is based in Chicago which I will forever associate with the rise of the post-rock scene – it has a strange urgency to it that I would usually only attribute to guitar-led bands.

I would suspect that part of that excitement stems from the fact that Alternate Moon Cycles was recorded live.

I think you're right. When you're going into a performance like this, where things could fall apart at every moment or where they could simply turn out to be incredibly tedious, there's going to be a risk of failure. That risk may be exactly the same in a studio- and a live situation. But of course, failure is a lot easier to endure or deal with without an audience present.

That said, there's so much here which draws from – or appears to draw from – the fact that the pieces were performed live. For one, the recording is very rough, with plenty of discrete ambient noises – chatter, the clinking of glasses and the like. And then, of course, especially with this slow, building music, the deeper you go, the more you create the sensation that “we're all in this together.”

As pianist Mathias Landæus said: “Every person in the audience has an effect on the music. The more improvised the music is, the bigger is the potential of each person to effect the sound in the room.“

But didn't you tell me earlier that nothing really happens here?

Quite on the contrary. In fact, something is always happening, always changing, never resting in one place. There are infinite shadings here, delicate variations of the same moment passing through time.

In that same interview with Landæus, which I really recommend, he also said that he had, with age, felt more and more drawn to “the kind of energy that unfolds naturally as you patiently dig deeper and deeper into the music.”

I do, too, and it is only through this kind of patience that you can experience the magic in something as uneventful as Mazurek suddenly deviating from the mission almost at the very end of the LP and playing a short, pastoral solo on his cornet.

It shouldn't amount to much on paper. Here, however, it means the world.

Could it be that you're trying to make this out to be more than just a drone piece because you like the music so much?

I don't think so because I really do like drone music and, just like the term ambient, do not consider it to be demeaning in any way.

But if you're implying that I'm biased – then yes, I am. This music is simply wonderful. And sometimes, that's all you need.