Scorch Trio with Michiyo Yagi
Shinjuku Pit Inn October 9, 2007
Raoul Bjorkenheim - guitars, viola da gimbri
Ingebrigt Haker Flaten - bass, electronics
Paal Nilssen-Love - drums
Michiyo Yagi - 21-string koto, 17-string koto
The Scorch Trio with Michiyo Yagi roared into the Pit Inn like a trio of Formula 1 sports cars only at higher volume. The trio from Norway knows intense music and how to deliver it raw. Yagi fit in perfectly with this concentrated form of energy. The two trios they formed blasted the club's audience and let them sort it out for themselves.
The uncompromising music was divided into two sets. The first featured Yagi on kotos with Flaten and Nilssen-Love. (Bjorkenheim was no doubt turning up the heat in the dressing room). The rhythmic interplay between bass and koto found points of overlap between the two musicians, but plenty of differences as well. Their exchange might be considered atonal, if tone was even a consideration, but friction might be more the central issue. The trio did create tonal structures and moments of semi-melodic transcendence, but that was only a secondary issue to how the trio could box each other's rhythms around.
The real excitement came from the call and response between the two, with Nilssen-Love accenting, pulling off-beats and creating a thumping undertow. The koto has its own world of harmonies, tones and sounds, but electrified and amped up, Yagi transformed it from a delicate traditional instrument to a heart-pounding weapon. That might be a problem if she was not so musical, and Flaten and Nilssen-Love were not the same, but the result was blistering music that burned bright for an hour-long set.
For the second set, Bjorkenheim brought out his array of electric guitars, though the traditional term "guitar" hardly fits the range of sounds, unusual and abrasive, that he gets from the instruments. Though as jazz-like as any group in the set-up of initial melody and new rhythm followed by wild improvisation, the trio sets its boundaries much, much wider.
The interplay between the Norwegian trio, who has released only a couple of CDs amid touring in Europe and America mainly, was a loose, road-ready one. The play free jazz, yes, but free in a way that is consistently and powerfully so. With Scorch, freedom feels like a language long since mastered, and now is ready for really saying something. Their songs often dipped into a melancholy, one might say "minor key" if keys were part of the deal. Yet, the feeling of each song had its own melancholy, with directions, frustrations, longing and an artistic melancholy all transformed into muscular energy and full-force drive.
Finding a unique guitar sound is rare in this day and age of electric guitarists by the millions, but Bjorkenheim is unequivocally unique. He is not either just a unique patchwork of other guitarists, but has a singular and very original voice that flows directly from him. Whether putting a bow to a self-designed instrument he calls the "viola da gimbri," or working on one or another of his guitars, the sounds just kept roaring out from his fingers, whether with a plectrum, bow or his fingers. Whatever his technique, the sonic power never lessened. Few groups are perfectly named, but Scorch very definitely is.
October 16, 2007