Infant Tree – IT039 784.73MB FLAC
AnimauX veGeTal occupies two CDs housed in a digifile sleeve, with one long performance placed on each disc. “AnimauX” lasts 39:06; “veGeTal” lasts 35:46. The division is not merely a solution to running time. It gives the two blocks separate physical bodies while presenting them as one organism. Anne Gillis supplies the calligraphy, Seymour Wright the images, and the oddly emphasized letters in the title make the words themselves appear manipulated, grafted and interrupted. Before a sound is heard, the object introduces the release’s central question: where does one form of activity end and another begin?
The personnel credits deliberately resist normal instrumental certainty. Gillis is responsible for “sounds/noises,” Wright for “actual and potential saxophone,” and Paul Abbott for “real and imaginary drums.” The joke is precise. A listener may recognize air passing through Wright’s alto saxophone, a drum surface struck or scraped by Abbott, or some bodily action from Gillis, but recognition rarely remains secure. Each performer works around the threshold where an instrument stops behaving like its accepted identity. The saxophone can become valve motion, breath, pressure or friction. The drums can appear as objects, surfaces and electronic events. Gillis’s noises move between voice, body, material and unidentifiable action.
That uncertainty has been cultivated over several years. XT—the London duo of Wright and Abbott—began collaborating with Gillis in 2018. Working remotely from London, Brussels and Paris, the three developed Our/s Bouture(s), eventually broadcasting it through Cafe OTO in 2021 for both an audience in the room and listeners online. It was released by Art Into Life in 2023. Further performances at Cafe OTO and Brussels’ Q-O2 in 2022 allowed them to cut into, extend and redistribute elements of the broadcast and its accompanying film. AnimauX veGeTal emerged only after all three finally met again at XTUDIO in London in September 2024.
The language surrounding the collaboration repeatedly draws upon horticulture: planting, grafting, pruning, seeding, growing and blooming. These are more than decorative metaphors for improvisation. A graft joins living sections that retain their individual origins while developing as one body. Pruning removes material so that future growth can take a different shape. Gillis, Wright and Abbott treat earlier performances in a comparable way. Material is not preserved as a stable composition to be replayed. An existing gesture may be cut, relocated, allowed to mutate or used as the rootstock for something that no longer resembles its source.
“AnimauX” immediately refuses the familiar model of free improvisation as three musicians engaged in an equal conversation. The sounds do not politely take turns or announce which performer is speaking. They overlap, obscure and partially imitate one another. A wheeze may belong to lungs, bellows-like saxophone action, electronics or an object dragged under pressure. Dry crinkling and scraping can resemble skin, paper, reeds, drum surfaces or amplified debris. Sharp percussive attacks stab through soft areas, but even these fail to establish a stable meter. Rhythm appears as a bodily reflex, then vanishes before it can become a pattern.
Wright’s idea of “potential saxophone” is crucial. The instrument’s potential includes everything that might happen before or after a conventional note: inhalation, embouchure pressure, a key touching its pad, saliva, resistance inside the tube and the unstable point at which air begins to produce pitch. His playing investigates those border states. A recognizable saxophone cry can form, but it is only one possibility among many. The horn is not treated as a heroic solo voice standing above the ensemble. It is a complicated acoustic body with valves, cavities, leaks and muscular demands.
Abbott’s “imaginary drums” expand percussion in a similar direction. A drum can be heard without a decisive strike. Resonance, vibration, skin tension and electronically mediated impulse can imply an instrument whose physical outline is absent. Abbott often works with triggered and amplified percussion, allowing tiny actions to produce disproportionate results. On AnimauX veGeTal, percussion may arrive as granular movement or compressed impact rather than a visible drummer’s sequence of strokes. The imaginary kit is assembled inside the listener’s attempt to identify it.
Gillis brings a different history of physical sound and performance. Her work has long treated the body neither as a vehicle for singing nor as a theatrical character, but as a source of involuntary-looking actions, repeated sounds, breaths and private rituals. Here she avoids the commanding role often assigned to a guest vocalist. There is no front position. Her presence can feel extremely close—mouth, throat, air, contact—then disappear inside XT’s compressed acoustics. Human and nonhuman signals continually exchange properties. A noise seems animal because it gasps or twitches, then vegetal because it curls, spreads or remains rooted.
The second disc, “veGeTal,” does not provide a calmer natural counterpart to “AnimauX.” Plants are not passive. They extend, split, coil, invade, harden and respond to light, moisture and damage. The performance grows through accumulation rather than linear development. Textures take hold in one register, send extensions into another and then collapse under competing activity. Some passages feel densely overgrown; others expose bare gaps where the smallest movement becomes disproportionately vivid. The trio’s restraint matters as much as its intensity. Silence and thinness are not pauses between important events but conditions that permit new forms to emerge.
The animal/vegetal division therefore does not classify individual sounds. It describes two approaches to motion whose boundaries keep failing. Animal movement appears quick, muscular and reactive; vegetal movement seems slow, distributed and persistent. Yet a sustained saxophone pressure can grow like a stem, while an electronic texture may suddenly recoil like an animal touched unexpectedly. Abbott’s percussion can spread through the stereo field like roots and then snap into reflexive attack. Gillis moves between all of these states, making the title less a biological opposition than a record of continual transformation.
Rory Salter recorded the session and joined the trio in mixing it, while Taku Unami handled the mastering. The recording preserves extreme detail without arranging the performers into conventional foreground and background positions. Close sounds remain tactile, but the total space is difficult to map. At moments the trio seems compressed into one unstable object; elsewhere the room opens and each scrape, exhalation or impact occupies a separate zone. This shifting distance makes the performance feel simultaneously documented and impossible to reconstruct visually.
AnimauX veGeTal is demanding because its seventy-five minutes offer few stable names to hold onto. It is free improvisation stripped of familiar rhetoric: no solo succession, no dependable instrumental roles and no simple march from quiet opening to explosive climax. Instead, the two discs preserve a day of growth at XTUDIO. Three distinct practices touch, interfere and develop temporary tissues between them. Some gestures survive long enough to become structures; others wither almost immediately. The finished object does not contain two representations of animals and plants. It captures musicians behaving like living matter—sensing, recoiling, branching, grafting and producing forms that could not have been planned before they began to grow.
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