#aytche

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Joseph Shabason Album Review: Aytche

BY JORDAN MAINZER

An album about physical and mental decay and memory loss risks being emotionally manipulative. But Joseph Shabason’s debut album Aytche, a collection of instrumental experimental saxophone-based tracks with a malleable sonic palette, actually puts you in the place of the haze. Shabason, who has contributed his playing to albums by The War on Drugs and, more notably, Destroyer (you have him to thank for that cornball saxophone playing on Kaputt), asserts himself as a player in the saxophone world like Colin Stetson--pushing the instrument not necessarily to its limits but exploring a side of it jazz musicians don’t often explore: Its potential for deep textures. 

This is immediately apparent on the opening track, the wonderfully titled “Looking Forward to Something, Dude”. Tenor saxophone interweaves with alto flute and various synth lines. The motif is repeated on “Smokestack”, which adds dissonant, distorted guitar courtesy of Destroyer’s Nic Bragg. It establishes both a narrative sense and some grating noise and rough edge to an album, something that so much ambient music, whether more accessible or more experimental, lacks. Closer “Belching Smoke”, too, features these same elements, this time with percussion. When the guitar drops out momentarily, it’s stunning, showing just how much sonic ground each instrument has been covering.

But what makes Aytche beautifully unsettling is the sequencing; Shabason carefully places serenity within chaos. The title track and “Neil McCauley”, sandwiched between the opener and “Smokestack”, are more understated, the former featuring a muffled trumpet solo from J.P. Carter, and the latter showcasing piano and prominent bass. “Tite Cycle” follows “Smokestack” and features field recordings of birds and melancholy, syncopated synths that could make for an R&B beat. “Long Swim”, which is next, also combines natural recordings--a barking dog and washboard percussion with sounds of water--with machine-like synthesizers. The downward melody of the saxophone reminds me of Paul McCartney singing “And I will sing a lullaby” on “Golden Slumbers”. It’s the most straightforward track on the album, and perhaps the most beautiful.

In between “Long Swim” and “Belching Smoke” are two of the album’s most difficult songs, and for different reasons. The penultimate track, “Chopping Wood”, features squealing trumpet from Nicole Rampersaud and percussive thumps. It’s an ugly but effective manifestation of its title. But “Westmeath” is the most devastating song on the album. The only one to feature any sort of vocals, it juxtaposes an interview with a man talking about his father’s trauma from being a Holocaust survivor, and his eventual suicide. Words and phrases cut in and out; you can understand what the interview is about but don’t get the details. It reminds me of the final room at Yad Vashem in Israel, where you look into a pool and see the hazy reflections of the surrounding walls that contain inscribed names of those who perished in the Holocaust--a reminder that as time goes on, history becomes harder to concretely recall. For Shabason, whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors, I can’t think of a more personal and noble way to engage with the fragility of memory: through art that, too, will live on through individual relationships to it.

8.3/10

<a href="http://josephshabason.bandcamp.com/album/aytche">Aytche by Joseph Shabason</a>

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Joseph Shabason Looking Forward To Something, Dude (2017)

From the album: Aytche (Western Vinyl)

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