Cormac Byrne & Adam Summerhayes – Stone Soup
Extinct Records – 5 May 2019
I have believed for a long time that there is magic contained in forms of improvised music that cannot be found in others and this album by Irish percussionist Cormac Byrne and virtuoso violinist Adam Summerhayes certainly backs that theory. The liner notes describe the music as a ‘pre-meditated’ set, but these tunes are improvised music at its strongest; two musicians who entered the studio with no tracks written and no charts to follow, facing each other with a microphone and plenty of apprehensions between them, playing these pieces with an almost a stream of consciousness approach and having most of what you hear come out first take in the order of the tracks on the finished record. It is an incredibly bold way to consider recording an album and thankfully the result is a truly original and magical piece of work that will thrill, delight and haunt the listener.
Adam took two fiddles into the sessions with him, one his prized piece and the other a junk shop instrument that earned its place on the album. Cormac was going to go for a purely bodhrán based percussive sound but soon decided that the soup needed some more spice and so brought in some slightly unusual instruments to add texture to the mix. His berimbau starts the album on ‘Arising: Part 1’ with a slightly mellow line, before the violin begins a stunning multi-tempo piece, but hearing this berimbau introduce the shortest piece here, ‘Arising: Part 4’ is wonderful in its idiosyncratic nature. Where Adam’s violin plays out a slightly anxious part, with some scratchy bowing and held notes evoking a nervous air, the bowed playing of the single string Brazilian instrument with the percussion running with it creates an urgent piece of music with hints of menace. The tune is progressive and unnerving and contrasts the previous ‘Part 3′ beautifully. Here the violin is full of confidence and the tune has more of a traditional Irish feel, with hints of Martin Hayes’ playing. Cormac provides a simple bodhrán beat that deliberately stays back from the violin and gives Adam centre stage. Working backwards, it is a more patient piece of music than ‘Part: 2’, where Cormac plays the beat very quickly and Adam’s fiddle ebbs and flows from the background to the very front and keeps time with such a rapid piece of percussion. At the mid-point the violin has a little wander around the sonic space, giving the music a gentle lull before both players go up a notch and play out the remainder of the piece at a hell of a pace, before abruptly ending. It is fantastic playing and great to hear a pair of musicians so comfortable in each other’s pockets.
The midsection consists of three ‘Moving’ parts, which begin with more space than the first section of the album. ‘Part 1’ has Cormac’s bodhrán playing out a speedy but gentle-natured beat, while the violin performs a series of long, more drone-like notes, which actually frame the percussion, rather than overtake it. That said, when the ghost of a melody comes in through the strings in the latter part of the piece, the effect is subtly mesmerising at the same time as being slightly teasing. You know there could be more of it, but this time the focus is about what is not being played and it makes for a fascinating and elegant piece of music. ‘Part 2’ reverts back to the Irish fiddle playing of ‘Arising: Part 3’, but with two cyclical lines, one high and light (the junk shop fiddle?) and the other lower and more present, until the tune goes into full-blown dance and Cormac demonstrates his ludicrously adept skills on the bodhrán, while Adam joins in the fun with some joyous upbeat playing.
By far the longest piece on the record is ‘Awakening: Part 1’, part of a pair of pieces that make up the third and final chapter of the set. Here things start with a soft shaker rhythm and a slower more spacious bodhrán line before the haunting violin comes in low and viola-like. This long piece plays out like a tragic narrative, with some of Cormac’s hand beats coming in firmly and bringing a dramatic feel to the mood, while some of the fiddle playing on multiple strings has an edge of loneliness to it. Part way in, the percussion double tracks with a higher keyed beat, which adds a new confidence to it and an exotic note to the flavour that surrounds the melancholy violin and seems to either provoke it or lift it to life. It is a song of multiple depths and emotions and one to lose yourself in (as you assume the two players did) and conjure up all kinds of fictives that might fit its tune and character. What is so impressive is that this didn’t even exist as a piece until these two began to play it at the recording sessions; with that in mind, it becomes something quite magical.
On the closing track, you can hear birdsong which was recorded live. Adam told us how they used a mic on each instrument and one out of the window… “The really weird thing was that the birds seemed to react – the birdsong increased when we were quietest. We wondered if we were imagining it, but you can see it on the sound files – a trio with nature!” The playing from both is in sympathy with this gentle sound of nature that leads us through ‘Awakening: Part 2’. It is possibly the loosest song here, along with ‘Moving: Part 1’, and the calm character and spare structure work nicely with the field recording, which alone closes this fifty-three-minute set. So it is not a short album by any means, but the whole thing is so impeccably thought out and executed and so finely nuanced that you want to put it on again straight away.
Under the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification system for almost all folk tales, the ‘Stone Soup’ ones are considered ‘clever man’ stories; these two musicians are most certainly clever men and their own Stone Soup project is the best thing I have heard so far this year. I love the innocence and mystery of improvised music and Stone Soup is one of the finest examples of it I can think of. A beautiful album.
Watch Arising: Part 3:
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Stone Soup is released on 5 May via Extinct Records
Cormac Byrne & Adam Summerhayes Live Dates
Sun, April 28 – Costa del Folk, Ibiza (Mainstage from 2pm | Folk Club from 10.30)
Supporting Show of Hands:
Mon, May 6 – Greenwich Cutty Sark, London, UK
Fri, May 10 – St Laurence’s Church, Ludlow, UK
Wed, May 22 – ARC, Stockton-on-Tees, UK
Thu, May 23 – The Civic, Barnsley, UK
Fri, May 24 – The Stables, Milton Keynes, UK
Photo Credit: Guy Carpenter