Fire! - 2013 - (Without Noticing)

Rune Grammofon – RCD2146

 The title Without Noticing describes both a danger and a method. Something may be changing while attention is elsewhere: a relationship, a body, the weather inside a room, the meaning of a repeated phrase. Fire! construct this album from musical events that initially seem almost immovable, then alter by degrees so small that the listener may only recognize the transformation after it has already occurred. A bass figure repeats, drums work around its edges, saxophone enters as shadow or pressure, and suddenly the place where the music began is no longer visible.

Every track title ends with the same parenthetical condition. “Standing on a Rabbit,” “Would I Whip,” “Your Silhouette on Each,” “At Least on Your Door,” “Tonight. More. Much More,” “Molting Slowly” and “I Mostly Stare” are all ordinary or peculiar actions performed without noticing. The phrases were taken from Bill Callahan’s short epistolary novel Letters to Emma Bowlcut, whose unnamed narrator sends sixty-two letters filled with observations, desires, stray details and emotional weather while Emma’s replies remain absent. Fire! remove fragments from that one-sided correspondence and place them inside instrumental music, where the missing response is supplied by repetition, friction and the listener’s imagination.

The record arrived at an important point in the group’s development. Fire! had begun in 2009 as Mats Gustafsson, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin, three musicians already experienced in jazz, improvisation, rock, electronic music and the social intelligence required to make unstable situations cohere. Their first album established a heavy, reduced language; subsequent collaborations with Jim O’Rourke and Oren Ambarchi opened that language to additional electronic mass and long-form development. Earlier in 2013, the trio had also become the core of the twenty-eight-member Fire! Orchestra on Exit! After commanding that enormous body, they returned here to three people and discovered that reduction did not require a reduction in scale.

The opening “Standing on a Rabbit (Without Noticing)” functions less like a conventional composition than the airlock leading into the album. Processed saxophone and electronics appear as foghorns heard through damaged weather. The sounds are physical but difficult to locate, suggesting machinery somewhere beyond the visible horizon. No beat arrives to explain the space. Fire! begin by removing the assumptions usually attached to a trio: there is no identifiable bass foundation, no drum entrance and no saxophone presented as a heroic lead voice. The listener is made to stand inside sound before being shown who is producing it.

Then “Would I Whip (Without Noticing)” finds the floor. Berthling’s electric bass introduces a riff heavy enough to resemble psychedelic blues rock, but its purpose is not to summon nostalgia for amplifiers and bell-bottoms. The riff is a research site. Werliin surrounds it with drums that refuse the simple duty of reinforcing every accent, while Gustafsson attacks from several directions through overdubbed saxophones. The bass repeats insistently, allowing the other instruments to test how far outward the music can travel before the center ceases to hold.

Berthling is the trio’s gravitational engineer. Gustafsson’s public image naturally attracts attention because a large saxophone in his hands can become an astonishingly physical event, while Werliin’s drumming appears capable of reorganizing a song from inside. Berthling is less theatrical, but Without Noticing repeatedly depends upon his ability to make a short figure feel inevitable without making it feel finished. His bass lines do not merely anchor improvisation. They create environments with their own laws of motion. The others may resist, decorate, scrape against or briefly abandon the riff, yet its return changes whatever happened during their absence.

This distinguishes Fire! from groups that simply combine free jazz with rock. In a less integrated hybrid, the rhythm section plays a riff until the saxophonist is given permission to become free. Here, freedom and repetition occur simultaneously. Gustafsson can remain attached to Berthling’s line while changing its emotional temperature through tone, breath and overpressure. Werliin may preserve the pulse while displacing its internal weight. The groove is not a cage that improvisation escapes. It is a flexible object all three musicians keep bending without breaking.

“Your Silhouette on Each (Without Noticing)” reveals how much space this method can contain. Fender Rhodes leaks into the arrangement while bass occupies the low register with patient, distorted movement. It is the album’s closest approach to a ballad, although no singer arrives and nothing settles into conventional tenderness. The title supplies the absent human figure: a silhouette repeatedly appearing on surfaces, perhaps because the observer is searching for one person everywhere. The music responds with recognition that is never complete. Shapes emerge, soften and become indistinct again.

The comparison to early Black Sabbath is useful here, not because Fire! imitate a particular riff but because both bands understand heaviness as atmosphere rather than velocity. The slow movement gives every note a larger shadow. Gustafsson does not need to fill the space continuously; his restraint allows the lower instruments to determine the room’s dimensions. When saxophone finally presses against the groove, it feels less like a soloist entering than something concealed in the architecture beginning to move.

“At Least on Your Door (Without Noticing)” returns the trio to open confrontation. Its quieter beginning creates a false sense of measured entry before Gustafsson and Werliin increase the pressure. The saxophone does not behave as a polished stream of notes. Breath, split tones, growls and vocalized textures remain audible inside the instrument, reminding us that a horn is a machine connected directly to lungs, throat and mouth. Gustafsson’s playing is powerful because it never fully conceals the body required to make it.

Werliin’s drums answer that bodily insistence without becoming accompaniment. His relationship to time is unusually elastic. Even when Berthling supplies a clear repeated figure, Werliin can imply several possible centers around it, creating the sensation that the music is stable and falling sideways at once. He does not destroy the groove through abstraction. He multiplies the groove’s possible shapes.

This is one reason Without Noticing can appeal equally to listeners coming from free jazz, krautrock, stoner rock, dub and post-punk. The record does not ask those traditions to pose for a group photograph. It identifies a common principle beneath them: repetition can intensify perception rather than reduce it. Can understood this through rhythm that seemed simple until one noticed how every musician was adjusting microscopic details. Om reduced metal to bass, drums and sustained spiritual pressure. Dub engineers transformed repeated tracks through subtraction, echo and changes in perspective. Fire! belong to this larger history of musicians who enter the loop not to become trapped, but to examine its interior.

“Tonight. More. Much More. (Without Noticing)” is one of the album’s strongest demonstrations of that interior space. Gustafsson and Berthling establish a slow, heavy line together, while organ, Rhodes, piano and modulated electronics deepen the surrounding field. The movement is deliberate enough that the slightest alteration becomes consequential. A chord placed behind the riff changes its apparent age. An electronic texture makes the same bass note feel less like an instrument and more like a structural vibration passing through a building.

The title suggests appetite increasing beyond intention. Tonight becomes more, then much more, without anyone recognizing exactly when the threshold was crossed. The music follows the same curve. It does not depend upon a sudden climax announcing that intensity has arrived. Accumulation alters the listener’s internal measurement until the original figure, still repeating, has become enormous. Fire! make escalation feel geological.

The keyboards are essential to this track and to the album’s broader character. Gustafsson is most commonly identified with saxophone, but organ and Fender Rhodes allow him to become part of the ground beneath his own horn. This creates an unusual self-relationship. One layer of Gustafsson can sustain an atmosphere while another pushes against it. The apparent trio briefly contains more than three bodies, not through decorative overdubbing but through the splitting of musical functions.

That doubling also complicates the usual division between rhythm section and soloist. Berthling contributes piano as well as bass, Gustafsson supplies harmonic texture as well as saxophone, and Werliin’s drums frequently provide melodic contour through tuning, cymbal color and changing density. Each musician can become foundation or disturbance. The hierarchy keeps rotating while the surface appears fixed.

“Molting Slowly (Without Noticing)” extends this process for ten minutes, the album’s longest piece. Molting is a perfect image for Fire!’s method because the underlying organism persists while its exterior is shed. Berthling introduces a measured melodic figure, and Werliin gradually increases the number of rhythmic possibilities surrounding it. Gustafsson’s phrasing can recall the ecstatic cry associated with Albert Ayler, but the invocation is not imitation. The important inheritance is the belief that a melody can remain simple enough to sing while being subjected to extreme emotional force.

The piece repeatedly approaches eruption without treating eruption as its only destination. Gustafsson may rise into upper-register anguish, Werliin may crowd the rhythm with increasingly urgent cycles, but Berthling’s figure continues providing continuity. The old skin does not vanish all at once. It loosens, tears and remains temporarily attached while something altered becomes visible beneath it.

This is the album’s deeper use of psychedelia. Psychedelic music is often described through effects, long durations or colorful distortion, but its more significant function is changing the listener’s relationship to scale and recurrence. A repeated object can begin looking unfamiliar. A few seconds can feel expanded. Background becomes foreground. Without Noticing achieves these effects without theatrical studio spectacle. It is psychedelic because attention itself becomes unstable.

The closing “I Mostly Stare (Without Noticing)” returns to electronics, completing the circle opened by the first track. Saxophone input is stretched, processed and torn until the instrument loses its familiar outline. After five substantial pieces built around physical bass and drums, the ending removes the body again. What remains resembles residue, transmission or evidence that the previous forty minutes are continuing somewhere the microphones cannot follow.

The title’s contradiction is quietly funny. Staring is usually considered concentrated attention, yet one can stare without noticing anything. Looking and seeing are not the same activity. The entire album lives inside that gap. A listener can hear the riffs immediately, but noticing what the musicians do within them requires another kind of presence. Fire! reward the point where listening stops waiting for obvious change and begins detecting pressure, texture and minute deviations.

The cover translates this method visually. Black-and-white photographic debris and rough horizontal brushstrokes are crossed by bands of purple, red and black. In the center, a clean white diamond holds the group name and title. The image presents order as a temporary opening inside abrasion. The central shape looks stable, yet its pointed top and bottom imply movement through the surrounding material, almost like an aperture being pulled apart. The music works similarly: a clear riff appears inside noise and motion, maintains its form for a time, then reveals that the surrounding disorder has entered it.

The exclamation mark in Fire!’s name could suggest constant explosion, but Without Noticing demonstrates the group’s control of slow combustion. Their intensity is not measured solely by volume or speed. It comes from purpose. Rune Grammofon described the pieces as spontaneous rituals rather than wandering instrumentals, and that distinction is audible. Improvisation does not mean that any event is equally useful. The trio listens with enough discipline to recognize which small idea can carry ten minutes and which event should vanish after two.

This discipline became especially important after the birth of Fire! Orchestra. A large ensemble can create abundance simply through the number of available colors. Three musicians have nowhere to hide. Every repetition exposes intention, every entrance changes the balance, and a weak idea cannot be disguised by mass. Without Noticing sounds partly like the trio reasserting the value of the smallest working unit after experiencing the possibilities of twenty-eight players.

At the same time, the trio already contains orchestral thinking. Berthling’s bass supplies recurring themes; Werliin distributes rhythmic color; Gustafsson moves among reeds, organ, Rhodes and electronics; overdubbing creates sectional responses; and the sequence carefully controls density across seven movements. Fire! do not imitate an orchestra’s size. They adopt its ability to organize contrasting materials across time.

The album also occupies a revealing place in Scandinavian improvised music. Gustafsson’s history includes free jazz, noise, garage rock, collaborations with Sonic Youth-related musicians and an obsessive relationship with physical records. Berthling has moved through jazz, experimental pop, electronic settings and groups including Tape and Angles. Werliin brought experience from Wildbirds & Peacedrums and other projects where percussion could operate as structure, texture and song simultaneously. Fire! are not attempting to prove that jazz can borrow from rock. Each musician’s life had already made the border irrelevant.

What remains meaningful is the encounter among their particular instincts. Gustafsson wants to test the material until it emits smoke. Berthling wants to discover how much consequence can be hidden inside a repeated line. Werliin wants to keep time alive enough that repetition never becomes automatic. Without Noticing is the place where those impulses stop competing and become one system.

Bill Callahan’s language adds another system running silently beside the music. His titles contain domestic objects, incomplete thoughts and bodily changes rather than the heroic abstractions often attached to instrumental jazz. Fire! could have named these pieces after fire, machinery, planets or spiritual forces. Instead, they choose rabbits, doors, silhouettes, staring and molting. The words bring the music down to human scale even when its sound becomes immense.

They also introduce uncertainty. “Would I Whip” is not a declaration but a question. “At Least on Your Door” feels like a fragment rescued from a sentence whose beginning has gone missing. “Tonight. More. Much More” turns punctuation into hesitation and desire. These phrases do not explain the compositions. They behave like objects placed near them, generating associations without closing interpretation.

That openness is why the album grows through repeated listening. The first encounter may emphasize impact: distorted bass, heavy riffs, muscular saxophone and drums refusing straight obedience. Later encounters reveal restraint, keyboard shading, internal rhyme among tracks and the way electronic miniatures frame the central performances. Eventually, the apparent weight begins to feel less important than the trio’s command of attention.

Without Noticing does not disguise complexity as simplicity. It discovers complexity already living inside simplicity. A riff repeated for several minutes is not empty until somebody adds more information. It is full of possible relationships waiting for musicians patient enough to expose them. Fire! make that exposure feel physical, occasionally violent and strangely meditative.

Anyone who saw the trio during this period, heard the pieces change in concert, knows more about the recording sessions or can identify exactly where each Callahan phrase appears in Letters to Emma Bowlcut could add another layer to the record’s history. That would suit an album built around details entering consciousness late. The music has been waiting inside its repetitions all along. We are the ones who arrive without noticing.