Augustin Brousseloux, Jean-Marc Foussat, Quentin Rollet, Oui A Vu Ce Mystere. . .

What is a soundscape? Like a landscape, it is something with a horizontal continuity, an expanse of music land and sky if you will, a series of event markings that draw out the particularities of that landscape, along with the continuity of horizontal sustains. More or less. The world of free jazz-new music has embraced soundscaping increasingly, it seems to me, over the last decades.

Qui a Ve Ce Mystere. . . (Improvising Beings ib54) is such  a soundscape and a good one it is. The music is crafted freely but with care and sensitivity by a threesome of Augustin Brousseloux on electric guitar, Jean-Marc Foussat on live electronics, and Quentin Rollet on alto sax.

Each falls into his specific role and there is a good deal of dramatics and space-time cosmetics to be heard in the 40-minute live number and the 20-minute studio follow-up.

It is more about creating a vibrant and vital collective sonance than it is so much about impressing a stamp of individual personalities times three, although each musician does have a personal musical fingerprint that we find all over the music.

But in the end it is about the unique scapeside aural view that is created over time, in this case two contrasting ones.

It is the sort of music Improvising Beings has had the nerve to put out over the past few years. It is an example of how the formulas of freedom and what is orthodoxy in free-new music is not necessarily the only way to go. 

This music transfixes if you listen closely and repeatedly. It is unfashionably electric, which means it is beyond fashion, or rather the fashion-of-fashion-rejection.

It takes some living with over time. And then, ideally, you get it.

Does this have anything to do with "Ascension" or "Hymnen"? Yes, undoubtedly there are roots there, but it furthers avant "traditions" in a disarming, non-traditional way.

I like that. Years from now, this music will either be entirely forgotten or considered an important new path. That in part is up to us, the community of listeners. Which is it?

Listen for yourself.

But listen.