Kenneth James Gibson & Paul Carman :: Murals For Immersion (Important / Cassauna)

These murals could just as easily be on the outside of a large city block, or sequestered inside of a dimly lit jazz café where modal post-bop has mutated into tranquil harmonic abstractions that hover like smoke above the tables of a transfixed clientele.

Soundscape paintings brushed across the stereo spectrum

Transcendent saxophone samples and the deep bass of a Moog Prodigy are conjoined together on Murals for Immersion, a collaborative ambient album from Kenneth James Gibson and Paul Carman. This is the sixth ambient album from Kenneth James Gibson using his given name, though he is no stranger to jumping around between the various styles that appeal to him in a variety of settings, while saxophonist Paul Carman comes to this project from his own decades of experience in all things jazz.

The title for this outing into the further reaches of ambient has it right, as these are soundscape paintings brushed across the stereo spectrum in swelling strokes to create an absorbing picture. The delicacy of the individual lines is heard in the granular texture of the details that add up to create a massive post-cubist tableau. These murals could just as easily be on the outside of a large city block, or sequestered inside of a dimly lit jazz café where modal post-bop has mutated into tranquil harmonic abstractions that hover like smoke above the tables of a transfixed clientele.

Gibson had his start making noise rock in the 1990s with his first outfit Furry Things and fans of chamber pop and hallucinatory Americana will know him from his work as one half of Bell Gardens, a project he started with Stars of the Lid member Brian McBride. Beyond that he’s given his time and attention to a flurry of other side projects and collaborations ranging from glitchy dub and experimental electronics to country, folk and Americana. Of interest here is his work with Gavin Toler from the band Winter Flowers with who he formed Toler Gibson whose work they’ve described as “Cosmic American Music.”

I think that appellation fits this collaboration with Paul Carman, though in a different manner. This is Cosmic American Music on the jazz side of the spectrum. The music of Toler Gibson and that on this current record share a love of sustained notes and drones. That’s what gives it the cosmic feel. The American feel comes from the expansive richness of Carman’s resonant saxophone.
All these combinations, when fit together, show just how broad each of the artists are in their appreciation of different styles of music, and how maverick they are in fitting themselves to these different modes. This is chamber music for subterraneans.

Chamber music for subterraneans ::

Carman started playing saxophone at age fourteen and it took him on a journey from California, to Cleveland where at sixteen he played in a large swing band, and eventually fell into the orbit of Frank Zappa who he recorded with in what the late maestro called The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life.  Among his early projects include the avant-garde jazz group Mother Tongue, and he’s been playing and recording ever since.

In the last part of 2022 Gibson and Carman started spending some time together at Gibson’s Idyllwild studios. The original intention of these sessions was for Carman to lay down enough saxophone material so that Gibson would have his own sound library of Carman’s work to craft a 100% saxophone / ambient album. They’d recorded all kinds of noise, drones, and sax melodies, so there was plenty of material to craft something beautiful. Even though Gibson had wanted to only use material that had emanated from Carman’s reed, something else was needed to fill in the space. This is where the Moog Prodigy came in, and it ended up being such a perfect choice. The two sound sources congeal around each other in perfect concord.  

“Finding a New Language” opens with an ominous sound like a foghorn. It clears away the grime of the daily trivial mind to make way for new shapes and images to appear out of the haze. Brief lulls in the fog-drifts open up large spaces for new sounds to materialize. Wide vistas emerge from out of the canyons and arroyos conjured up by these sublime tones.

The second track, “Selective Noticer” has what sounds like bits of sax spit and grit affixed to the surface of the recording, like pointillist dots. These little tiny particles flick out of the surf as low tones and resplendent brass shine like stars above a dark pacific edge. It’s a quick swirl that eddies into the long calm of the title track, whose brighter lines shift between sax and synth. Sometimes I can’t tell which is which, as the colors are blended with such mastery.

“4 Corners in D” is elevated music. As a culture, we need more of that, even in elevators. It is music for making an ascent, one that reaches a culmination on “Above Suicide Peak.” For such an ominous title, this piece has a hopeful resonance as I continue to soak in this bath of warm phosphorescence, as one song flows into another.

Music for making an ascent ::

The longest song in this chamber suite is “Tonio Between Two Poles.” It starts with a gentle vibrato playing between the poles of left and right speaker. Then it disappears briefly into a mantic hum before coming back to life in a high pitched waver that gets answered by deep blasts of wind. Throughout all the pieces you can hear washes of reverb and other treatments but it is never overcooked. No other sonic seasonings are necessary. Simple ingredients have made a profound dish.

Speaking of reverb and effects, I’d love to hear this duo play together in a cistern, the way Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and there compatriots did. Or in an abandoned silo, or some other place with long natural delays and echos. And even if that doesn’t happen, I sure hope they put out another collaborative record. It is obvious they put a lot of care and attention into sculpting these long sustained tones and pastoral textures.

At the end of the album I am returned to square one by a slightly different route, as they present a dismantled version of the opening track. The middle tracks have now been bookended in a fitting symmetry and the journey is complete. This is a truly cosmic Amer-ambient kind of jazz music. I’ll be coming back for repeated voyages into this wondrous imaginational landscape.

Murals For Immersion is available on Important / Cassauna. [Bandcamp | Important]