Carsten Dahl Experience: Caleidoscopia

Rating: ★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Nils Davidsen (b)
Carsten Dahl (p)
Stefan Pasborg (d)
Jesper Zeuthen (as)

Label:

Storyville

May/2017

Catalogue Number:

101 4303

RecordDate:

2016

There is no shortage of Carsten Dahl recordings, and this latest with his Experience follows on from the triology Humilitas (2010), Metamorphosis (2011) and Reverentia (2013) and what presumably were some afterthoughts on Soliluque (2013). Caleidoscopia continues their odyssey into refining a personal improvisational language. From the outside looking in they seem to have created and refined something close to a kind of musical mutual intelligibility among themselves (mutual intelligibility is the basic function of language) and this album is probably the best representation of what they do. But just like Pirahã, spoken by natives of the Amazonian rainforest or Rotokas, spoken by the peoples of Papua New Guinea, we may be fascinated to learn they are among the most obscure languages on the planet, but most of us have no desire to learn them. And that is the question we have to ask of this album – do we wish to spend hard-earned leisure time trying to understand a musical language that has retreated so far inside itself it has little to offer the outside world – one of the problems of obscure languages. Does the flatulent saxophone tone adopted by Zeuthen on ‘Nora’, the episodic nature of the music often held together by a tonal centre that offers only extended development rather than a sense of resolution move or inspire us in any way, provoke any emotions, make us feel happy or sad, uplifted or melancholy, or is it just plain boring? Perhaps only the speakers of Pirahã can explain.

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