*2024 stock* What began as an improv set at Berlin’s Harlekin bar developed, over the past two years, into a complete body of work evoking multiple time periods, genres, characters, and sonic landscapes. The seven tracks that make up Here Appear harness elements of classical, drone, avant-jazz, and distorted pop, coupled with an ambitious vocal delivery that draws on the phrasing and articulations of Essex’s own woodwind playing, to create a quasi-narrative mélange retaining the vulnerability of live performance.
Saxophone and piccolo interludes “Immediate Communicator” and “Colorless Stone” move between medieval-tinged melodic inventions and textural noise, recalling a Pharoah Sanders-influenced fever dream, while the linguistic abstractions of Russian conceptual poet Lev Rubinstein guide the looped, layered, and textured vocals of title track “Here Appear.” The album closes with a languid take on Jacqueline Humbert & David Rosenboom’s 1978 composition “Clear Light” from My New Music, recently reissued by Unseen Worlds.