Crowded? Not at all! You may think that the soundworld of Experimentations in Minimalism will come across congested and ear shattering, but again: not at all! The sound web might be intricate, but it is also clear-cut like a skillfully cut diamond and semi-transparent like crystal. This music comes very close to the art of painting, as the artist/composer applies fat strokes of his brush, having the earth colors – in some of the compositions – and the golden and bright blue colors in other works – mix and yet retain their separate qualities. This music brings a kind of jubilant joy of composition and of performing, perfectly blending the two properties of complexity and clarity in persuading patterns of art and intellect.

Track 1. Selfish Shellfish [6:20]

Thomas Helton opens this calm motion with his double bass, setting the pace, strolling along in a slightly limping progression, to which saxophones of various kinds do adhere, sometimes in thick, simultaneous layers of fat colors of darker hues; sometimes in soloist excursions that pierce and slash the canvas in blinding shots of light.
Moaning – from lust or pain? – figures rise out of the ensemble, curving and spiraling, tearing at themselves, while saxophone tuttis arise in thick slabs of audio, expanding and contracting, at times opening whole hen houses of worried exclamations!
The stumbling beat is steadily delivered by the double bass, and saxophones are recorded close-up, their gold-and-silver vibrations entering your skull in a surprising, physical nowhere-to-hide way.

Track 2. Pious (Clarinet) [1:39]

This is a clarinet gem if ever there was one; a jolly, happy – in that meek, low-key manner – melody that dances about, like a young housewife of the 1950s, swirling about in her domestic isolation, in the light of diagonal rays falling through the windows onto the rag-mats on her kitchen floor. This is music of unpretentious happiness in lonely moments, when the body feels lighter and there’s no real reason to worry.
These to clarinets let the music dance with itself in two harmonious, counter-pointing melodies that light each other like two people – husband and wife – might amplify each other, and in this lonely but happy soloist housewife midday dance there is a vibrant, swaying melody space for the spouse not present. A truck outside of the recording space – the Double Image Studios – gives you an idea of a world outside of this power of imagination…

Track 3. Experimentations In Minimalism I [7:53]

You know, I wouldn’t call this jazz. I’d call it music. That’s about it. That’s what Miles Davis said about his music too; not jazz: music! This particular piece has a steady, repetitious, tempting danger going on, leaving ample space for the players to growl, rise and shine and bend down below into the depths to dig into lower chakras – reminding me quite a bit of Terry Riley’s all night flights with Poppy No Good and the Phantom Band, but Terry Riley’s so-called minimalism is simply music too, and we don’t need those terms for understanding something where there is nothing to understand; where the trick is to listen, let the music flow, wash through your system – and that is what Thomas Helton’s music does; washes through your system!
Even though, I suppose, this piece has several musicians playing, it sounds just like Riley’s all night flight recordings, when he is playing against a delay of his own playing. This creates a hall of mirrors, opening up endlessly in all directions. Thomas Helton’s Experimentations In Minimalism I opens up endlessly. It’s a sheer joy to listen, with a kind of physical pleasure, as the music transforms your very perception into a hypnotic dream, with a tickling sensation rising up your neck, traveling your skull, leaving the tip of your nose with a loud, sharp spark of static electricity!

Track 4. Experimentations In Minimalism II [3:15]

This second minimalistic experimentation comes across geometrically, in tilting walls of wind music, in a bewildering weightless motion of loose sound walls falling away like weathered rectangular pages of a score lifted off of a music-stand by a whirlwind; a surrealist painting of a stage hovering low over a desert, with a music stand and those pages rising in a spiral motion up, up and away towards the horizon – and this second minimalistic Helton experimentation rises like that, little by little, to travel the inversion layers of a musical atmosphere that places fairytale mirages all along the horizon…

Track 5. Experimentations In Minimalism III [4:30]

Growling, buzzing, humming and droning! It’s like some dark beings out of the shadows of Lord of the Rings, slowly dancing their magic in the obscurity of a dimension only partly connected to ours…
The lower chakras connect with the highest one, soaring above our heads. This music engages the whole circle of existence and moves it on up in a spiral: the sounds of dark matter that occupies most of space; this calculated but not understood property of this wholeness of life and death that we call existence.
The repetitious growling moves and spreads like dark tunnels through the clay that forms the skin of the planet. This music tickles Planet Earth. Thomas Helton solidifies cosmic thoughts in these dark, rumbling extensions. Mighty!

Track 6. Pious (Trombone) [1:03]

This trombone lightness swirls in rhythmic patterns of another time, perhaps the baroque. I get a sensation of sunny reflections off of golden brass instruments humping and pumping away frivolously back and forth across a castle yard while streamers fly in the wind high above, on top of towers and steeples. The music combines two lines of melody that counterpoint each other in rare clarity, in a latticework that plainly shows the complexity of its construction. Beautiful, clean, fresh, healthy and jolly!

Track 7. FU&ThyRIO [9:01]

This is a longer piece that in fact does come on in a jazzy manner, the bass pattern treading speedily and steadily in strong and clean finger pickings, while the wind instruments sing and mumble like spreads of honey across rye bread, or like the slow and thoughtful movements of an anatomy encasing the beating of a heart; the eyes way up in the face gazing across the curvature of its celestial home, through the atmosphere that is the breath of God. The cattle moo and bellow in the warmth of their barns under twinkling stars as the days between Christmas and New Years pass in one long breath through the Northern Hemisphere. Light is a rare commodity. Helton’s music moves in elegant motions of pitch black and gusts of animal warmth. I sit back and feel cuddled, just as if I’ve just sipped some Cragganmore! This is high praise for Thomas Helton!

Track 8. Pious (Trumpet) [0:52]

The third version of Pious is also the shortest, and the final cut on this album. It is a beautiful and positive, optimistic way of concluding this vibrant collection of tunes. The trumpets tread with a special, loving tenderness across the duration allotted, and the brevity of their audibility isn’t worrisome. I listen on repeat as I write, and the music of Pious, the trumpet version, signals out of some light and painless state, which is where we’re all destined, after innumerable lives: enlightenment, liberation!