Tom Heasley & Toss Panos
Passages



Tom Heasley & Toss Panos – Passages
Tom Heasley [tuba, voice, electronics, loops]
Toss Panos [drums]

Full Bleed Music FBM001. Duration: 73:21


1. Different Worlds [24:09]
2. 98% Pure [9:53]
3. Elegy for Philip Berrigan [11:54]
4. Zephyr [10:13]
5. Cliffs of Moher [17:18]


Can I have some more of this, please! Yes, that is the immediate reaction; an urge for more – because this music is so original and so tempting and fulfilling, that you’d gladly designate a whole day for it, and even set aside some days in coming months too, to keep you on track; on the track that this sound art has you rambling down your lifeline!

Passages is a set of five works for tuba and drums, that come across like sketches drawn with coal on steep rocks of granite and gneiss in a raking light that hits the face of the rock like a shower of arrow heads from time indefinite.

Yes, the music exists like contours, outlines – in a landscape, material or immaterial. It’s stripped bare of any unnecessary residue, yet filling all requirements of the word “filling”. The sounds are sufficient, in a sort of auditive equilibrium, which would whimper and fall away, were anything added or withdrawn. A master of arithmetic has defined the angles in these sonar calculations.

Breathless expanses of rock and ice and snow and trickling water and vapor and light open: Lapland in July or August, somewheres north of the Kebnekaise massif: Unna Reaiddávággi between Nallo and the Pyramid! The music is violet and black with a lot of muscle.

This is music to tread in rough, sturdy boots (Meindl Island Pro MFS Wide?), dressed in a Gore-Tex jacket and wind-proof pants, a cap and your face greased with sun protection cream; a couple of glacier shades to protect your eyesight from summer’s opthalmia nivalis! And don’t forget to bring your Petzl Charlet Irvis Flexlock crampons for those steep snowfields and slanting glacier slopes!

The tuba – the TUBA! – rolls its deep waves of low-chackra sonorities and lofty Rigpa interferences through the Unna Reaiddávággi Valley, across the rock deserts and the lakes with glacier water, hitting the precipitous walls of mountain giants like the Sentinel and the Knife’s Ridge (Vaktposten & Knivkammen); deep bony sounds – armed with the sparse, semi-transparent, poignant percussion that hammers black dots of reference in the northern badlands: mineral music, light reflecting in a million wet pebbles. Heasley’s and Panos’ music lets the barren lands talk, and it’s no idle chatter!

Standing in this music, +5℃ and gusty, you feel the tingling of energy spreading through your material body after a brief break to the leeward of a black rock and the intake of a power bar. Fearless ahead! as Stockhausen used to say!

The combination of Tom Heasley’s deep, reverberated tuba with the bouncing, hard beat of Toss Panos’ drum work and his softly rustling percussion (never falling prey to useless repetition or techno flair) and the addition of Heasley’s light electronic treatment and even voice at some instance, make for a never before heard music, which spellbinds me, I do admit! This is consistent throughout, and NEW!