When John Cage announced to Arnold Schoenberg that he had no “feeling for harmony,” Schoenberg warned that his composition would eventually hit an impenetrable wall. Cage, in his usual eloquence, professed that he would, then, proceed to beating his head against that wall. This anecdote seems an apt description of the current state of art: the cyclical repetition of heads banging against the wall, the constant regurgitation of ideas. Be that as it may, every now and then, a banging head can split the tiniest of cracks in that wall and gift us with a sliver of light from the modernist side of newness and innovation, with hope for the future of sound.
When Paul Flaherty and Bill Nace collaborate on anything, the result is often — if not always — staggeringly poignant, and Broken Staircase, their latest offering with vocalist Laila Salins, is no exception. The trio’s greatest achievement on this album is its ability to infuse the hallmarks of improvisational free-noise-jazz while maintaining a reliably fresh perspective and elaborate dynamic. With Staircase, longtime collaborators Flaherty and Nace deliver all of the expected and pre-established elements of their jazz improvisation: the brutal crunch of Nace’s guitar noise, the exploratory squeal and squawk of Flaherty’s sax, and — this time around — the undeniably maniacal voice manipulations of Salins. The resulting product, however, is far from formulaic. The sound that was mastered with Flaherty and Nace’s outrageous An Airless Field in 2010 is now expanded with complements of an additional dimension of vocal improvisation, and all elements unsurprisingly function harmoniously as cooperative (yet enraged) vehicles in a unified stream of consciousness, rather than divided units tossed about in the same car crash.
A perfect example of this can be heard in the ear-splitting track, “Axis Shift.” Just as the sounds from Nace and Flaherty move toward and away from each other, so follows the voice of Salins, as she shouts along with sax blasts and growls to the grit of Nace’s buzz. Her voice dutifully acts to complement Flaherty’s rusty arpeggios with bellows of vibrato and then abruptly cracks to the dissonant shriek of guitar feedback sounding off from the distance. At this point in the track, a listener might assume that Salins is merely chasing her instrumental companions with reckless abandon and fickle shifts of attention, but as the title seems to imply, the track consists of a game of exchange, a tag-you’re-it style of follow-the-leader. Although Salins may seem to parrot the textures and gestures of the group’s instrumentation, she soon grabs the reigns, decaying her vocals into delirious laughter. Flaherty follows suit as his sax yawps along in a grim chortle. The three in unison then begin to scream in shrill terror.
The dynamic isn’t lost in the cacophonous climax, fortunately, as the record displays the sort of restraint we have come to expect from Flaherty’s collaborations. Salins also seems to understand that a vocal improvisationist can overstay one’s welcome through excessive hyperactivity, so she coolly calms her panicked warble into low hums and murmurs as Nace quiets his guitar gristle and Flaherty smooths into more melodic territories. The moment provides an aesthetic breather in the eye of the storm, one that returns with pick scrapes and distortion crunch throughout the instrumental, sans-vocal track “Glass Hand.”
The album closes with the most reflective track, “Blistered Thoughts,” which features Nace’s guitar fuzz-grind assuming the foreground, as Flaherty and Salins take turns in accompaniment. By the album’s end, everything slowly collapses like an exhausted beast losing its footing. The music is finished, but what remains is the feeling that a brilliant event has just taken place, a choreographed accident that invites both rationality and irrationality to understand it.