With exemplary improvised music creativity is immediate – completely of the moment – an evolving tapestry of linked moments across a performance so fluid that when combined with emotion and technique it can create a transcendental experience for performer and listener. The power of improv music lies in its ability to surpass the now and live in and out of time, to follow the nuances and desire of its players. It is free to breath in and out, to meander, skip alongside, brush against and converge on a sonic jetstream. As John Cage once noted, “the idea of a mistake is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is.”
Featured on the second volume of MEANS magazine’s fundraising compilation series, ‘Name the Winds’ is a wonderful snapshot into this type of organic and authentic unprepared ekstasis. Created by Concrete Gazebo, a Cambridge-based group of improvising musicians, who includes members of Kelvox1, Threshold Entities and nu tscd, Name the Winds takes the listener on a journey through an ambient rural soundscape which ebbs and flows across cinematic textures both beautiful and atonal, where violins scrap and sigh and electronics pulse and drone, exhaling an organic energy that drifts on a moorland wind.
With their name recalling a fondness for concrète music mixed with the freestanding, open garden structure, Concrete Gazebo seem perfectly designed to connect experimentation with performance. Name the Winds connects to nature not only by its title but through its evocation of natural landscapes and the environment – a theme that runs throughout Concrete Gazebo’s back catalogue, see previous titles (‘Rushes’, ‘Moonglow’, ‘Peacock Juice Box’) to the accompanying artwork which they create themselves. However, the world in which Name the Winds inhabits is pushed to the hazy margins of reality. Its tone is urgent, unnerving, as if reaching out into the ether for some sense of direction to help cross a misty, haunted landscape to recover and untangle forgotten voices.
Since the beginning of the first lockdown in 2020, the majority of Concrete Gazebo releases have been born from out of online sessions using JamTaba (https://jamtaba-music-web-site.appspot.com). These individual tracks were edited down from regular jam sessions and mixed by the group. Concrete Gazebo also have run regular nights of open experimental performance called Under the Concrete Gazebo at the Blue Moon pub in Cambridge since 2018, where all are welcome to join in or observe a night of improvised music.
At these Under the Concrete Gazebo nights, accompanying abstract visuals are generated by someone drawing on a laptop running the software Processing (https://processing.org) which is then projected behind the performers. Dragging the pen across the tablet affects the sound received by the microphone, so frequency of the sound can affect colour, while volume affects the size of the pen mark.
This almost symbiotic connection between sound and picture is at the heart of this outfit’s spirit. Their music is very evocative of shifting space and place. It’s about the collective live experience. About community and connection in both public and private spaces, particularly in a post-lockdown world. There is an immediacy which makes you feel like you are sharing the same space as the players and are free to be swept along by their reverb-laden, dubby jams. Concrete Gazebo are curious, attentive, generous and mystical. Through their music they explore and observe ever-evolving sound worlds and invite us to step into these vistas. So why don’t you join them and seek solace on a seat at the Concrete Gazebo?
Name the Winds appears on the MEANS compilation album Living Within Our Means Vol 2: https://meansmag.bandcamp.com/album/living-within-our-means-vol-2
You can listen and support Concrete Gazebo on Bandcamp: https://concretegazebo.bandcamp.com as well as releases such as 2022’s ‘Fleeting’ on Anticipating Nowhere Records and ‘Peacock Juice Box’ which was released in 2021 by Speak & Spell Records.
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Ryan Hooper
MEANS 