SAWT OUT - Fake Live In America - REVIEWS
Sawt Out (a word play, as sawt means voice or urban music in Arabic) is the Berlin-based experimental, free improvising trio of Lebanese trumpeter (and visual artist and cartoon author, who designed the cover artwork) Mazen Kerbaj and German percussionists Burkhard Beins and Michael Vorfeld (who is also a visual artist), both of them protagonists of the Berlin Echtzeitmusik, who have been working together in various formations. This trio was founded in 2015, soon after Kerbaj relocated to Berlin, and Fake Live in America is its fourth album, recorded live at eleven concerts in June 2023, from the East Coast through the Midwest to the northern West Coast of the United States.
Sawt Out's three gentlemen have their own idiosyncratic approaches to their acoustic instruments. Kerbaj employs the trumpet as a modular metal machine that transfers air, almost never in a conventional manner. Often it rests between his legs while he blows into a plastic hose connected into its mouthpiece, and, obviously, uses extended breathing techniques. Beins and Vorfeld do magic with skins and metal surfaces, and add to their arsenal self-designed string instruments, balloons, light bulbs, and walkie-talkies. Often, the trio blurs or blends the sonic origins of each instrument.
Fake Live in America is a collage of three extended pieces, made in distinct spaces with different acoustics and different recording qualities, ranging from detailed miking to plain smartphone recordings, mixed and edited by Beins. But this supposedly fake, live sonic collage does not attempt to camouflage Sawt Out's process of music-making. It distills perfectly the restless and obscure but imaginative ways which the rich, radical, and subversive sound worlds of Kerbaj, Beins, and Vorfeld collide, resonate, and interact. These gifted improvisers sound like different lobes of a greater sonic organism that is experiencing an insightful and visceral psychedelic trip, totally possessed by its powerful and intense music. Sawt Out articulates its enigmatic, thought-provoking textures with captivating playfulness, and great precision and focus on detail.
- Eyal Hareuveni, The Free Jazz Collective -
Longtime associates Beins and Vorfeld have played with everyone from Philip Samartzis and John Butcher to Rhodri Davies. Meanwhile Kerbaj, who is also a published cartoonist, has worked with the likes of Sharif Sehnaoui. Beginning with a shrilling, scraped brass timbre, the Sawt Out trio's interaction advances not only with unusual trumpet thrusts, but a panoply of textures that can be produced from percussion instruments. From that point on the tracks are studded with unexpected and exceptional tones encompassing cascades of smears and half-valve projections, vocalized tongue flutters, inner horn cackles, extended non-valve drones and heraldic honks from the trumpeter. Meanwhile the two percussionists jointly outline equivalent idiophone augmentation including gong reverb, full kit rumbles, doorstopper-like reverberations, scrapes along unyielding metal, music box-like tinkles and squeezed metal bowl echoes.
Centrepiece of the program is the over 42 minute 'Don't Block The Box' where all of these procedures are exhibited along with many more. Conveyer belts of drum top slaps, smashes and buzzes share space with gearwheel-like ratchets, passing freight-train-like vibrations, stark cymbal shrieks and lug-loosening vibrations. Not to be outdone Kerbaj's intersection with these constantly changing percussion patterns includes tongue sucking, retching whooshes, extended buzzes, frenetic triplet patterns, strident trills and watery lip flutters.
Splintering still more in the track's second sequence, the trumpeter's alien whines and mumbles are amplified as if propelled through a megaphone and predominate until superseded by martial music-like pressure and steel drum-like slaps from the drummers which become blunter but louder as the improvisation progresses. Repeated wooden and metal clip clops and zither string-like strains produce a profusion of idiophone colors that reach a zenith of rattles and rebounds alongside aviary caws and cackles from the trumpet. All climax when speedy drum pounding combines with undulating brass trills.
- Ken Waxman, Jazzword -
11 Stationen kreuz und quer durch den United Shit of America, von Boston bis Seattle, von Columbus bis Portland. Wobei Burkhard Beins das, was er im Juni 2023, also noch unter Biden, zusammen mit Mazen Kerbaj und Michael Vorfeld perkussiv und trompetistisch dargeboten hat, gegen den dokumentarischen Strich collagiert und aufbereitet hat. Um nach dem Einstieg mit Pauken- und Beckenschlägen und Tier-, Pust- und Pfeiflauten, die Kerbaj der Trompete abgenötigt, das Essentielle ihrer Ästhetik hervorzukehren und die Kontraste zu akzentuieren. BA ist mit BB seit 1985 verbunden, mit Sawt Out durch "Machine Learning", ihr Roadside Picnic für BA 117, mit Kerbaj, dem libanesischen Trompeter in Berlin, durch sein Cover für BA 123. Getupfte, geklopfte, gewischte, steinig klackende, gongig gedongte, metallisch gepingte, schiefrig gescharrte Klänge sind verzahnt, verlippt, zergirrt, zerschmatzt, umschnaubt, beploppt zu einer wundersamen Zoophonie, die sich überlappt mit humanosphärisch prämodernen Anmutungen. Trappelnde Pfoten, flötende Töne, Laute aus Schlünden, grunzenden Schnauzen, rumorenden Bäuchen. Andererseits sirrt wie aus Werkstätten Metall, wird halbwegs rhythmisch geklopft, Kerbaj presst surrende Laute durchs Mundstück. Als Narrativ, was es wohl gar nicht sein will, kämen sowas wie die Höreindrücke einer abgebrühten Maus in Frage, die bedrohlichen von ortsüblichem Krach zu unterscheiden weiss. Nach 'Way In' (11:10) und dem starken Beifall nach 'Don't Block The Box' (42:04) erklingt mit allerfeinstem Metallklingklang, Bowing und Fingerperkussion noch 'Way Out' (18:30) in ppp als Onkyokei-Encore.
- Rigobert Dittmann, Bad Alchemy -