Tom Richards
Pink Nothing

Inversions: ...After the release of Technique & Rite in 2017, and the album Terminal Desert release under the name LaBrecque / Barakat earlier this year, here comes the second “official” Crème de Hassan record on Inversions.Whereas the two previous releases were based on longer instrumental jams, Tricontinental Circus is focused on rhythm and language, and the resulting 11 tracks are short and compact, exploring the possibilities of combining these into improbable hybrids.The tracks include Haitian voodoo rhythms, a Burkinabe flute player aligned with a sequencer and a guitar + synth jam with echoes of the sound of early 1970s Düsseldorf.The languages that are dispersed across the album come from Cambodia, Afghanistan, Kenya, Lebanon, Morocco and include an Arabic translation of Nietsche by friend of the band Ayoub El Mouzaine.

Founded in 2015, Tears|Ov are sound artist/self-taught musician Lori E Allen, classically trained cellist/mixed media artist Katie Spafford and illustrator/prison psychotherapist Deborah Wale. The trio first collaborated on Lori E Allen’s ‘Tears of the Material Vulture’ cassette on The Tapeworm, a re-imagination of a brief collaboration with Madame Chaos of cut-up cablecasts, 1995-1996, on Manhattan Neighborhood Network and Television in New York City. That release served to resurrect a hibernating creative practice between the three friends.Their writing process takes the form of structured improvisation. Allen will create a bed of loops, field recordings or a full framework. She then shares this base with Wale and Spafford who embellish or delete, the three building the pieces through long improvised sessions in London, playing late into the night. During these sessions, the feeling of a songs’ words or the emotional tone of a sound can spark sudden mood changes, altering the arc of the compositions. ‘Crucially the music is improvised – it is never the same twice. There are triggers and moments that signal moving to another part of the music, but the timings and lengths largely depend on our moods and interpretation on a given day/performance. Because of this, the album was recorded with ambient mics capturing multiple instruments. It wasn’t possible to record all the instruments separately as we respond to each others improvisation. Even if the changes are very minor, they really affect the emotion of each piece’ Spafford says.