My review of Sonar's latest, Vortex, in collaboration with guitarist/producer David Torn, today at All About Jazz.
It might be all too simple to explain away Sonar, the Swiss twin-guitar/bass/drums quartet now in its eighth year together, through a series of touchstones. King Crimson, by way of that band's co-founder/guitarist Robert Fripp's Guitar Craft? Check. The influence of Nik Bärtsch and Don Li's innovative meshing of Steve Reich-ian minimalism with deceptively complicated polyrhythmic and isorhythmic rock/funk grooves, where as much as can be is made of as little as possible? Double Check. Guitarist and primary composer Stephan Thelen's career as a mathematician, contributing to his polymath approach as Sonar's primary composer? Triple Check. An intended avoidance of guitar pyrotechnics and, instead, a group sound based upon complex interactions, where layered vertical harmonies remain, despite their innate complexities, somehow comfortably spare, spacious and eminently appealing?
You get the idea.
Except that even this multiplicity of foundational cornerstones doesn't really go far enough in describing a group that is truly like no other. Most often lumped into a progressive rock rubric occupied by far too many others who view it as a genre rather than a philosophy, Sonar is a rare band that has truly focused on the "progressive" in "progressive rock," beginning with its 2012 debut, A Flaw of Nature (released, perhaps unsurprisingly, on Bärtsch's own Ronin Rhythm imprint).
With further international visibility garnered through its association with Cuneiform Records, Sonar continued honing its foundational cornerstones, making significant strides forward with two subsequent releases, 2014's Static Motion and 2015's Black Light. Further mining the tritone-based tuning and specified harmonics that have been both philosophical and harmonic context-setters for bassist Christian Kuntner and guitarists Thelen and Bernhard Wagner, the quartet also made significant headway when it chose, after its first two self-produced recordings, to collaborate with renowned engineer/producer David Bottrill on Black Light.
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