Andreas Schaerer – ‘Anthem For No Man’s Land’

It seems a fair bet that the voice was the first instrument, and ever since humans began to sing, music, language, and musical language have been mixed together. They remain hard to disentangle. We turn to music to express what is otherwise inexpressible, so perhaps words are redundant. Yet a singer who uses their voice simply as an instrument might feel eschewing words to be a kind of self denial.

One vocal artist pondering this is the Swiss Andreas Schaerer, whose voice is of course a remarkable instrument, and who habitually sings in several languages, or none. On this latest release from his quartet with drummer Lucas Niggli, guitarist Kalle Kalima and accordionist Luciano Biondini, six years after their debut A Novel of Anomaly (link to review below), he takes this a step further. There are wordless vocals here, but also tracks where Schaerer sings in an improvised language. This is made up of non-words that nonetheless use phonemes that suggest the listener is hearing one or more European languages.

That is quite effective in some ways, lending the sometimes quite complex written lines an improvised quality, and allowing Schaerer to extemporise freely in the same vein using a teasing repertoire of sounds that is a vocabulary only in the musical sense yet comes across like he might be using actual words.

It also aligns conceptually with the sentiment that informs the quartet’s musical project here, a wish to move beyond borders, transcend territories, and emphasise cultural expression that conveys our common humanity – hence Anthem for No Man’s Land.

Some might feel music does that anyway, just as group improvisation always benefits from open-hearted communication between the players. And in truth the new album does not sound radically different from the quartet’s first offering. That’s a good thing, as this is a tremendous group. Niggli and Kallima have a long sympathy with Schaerer’s dizzying variety of vocal styles, and Biondini’s exuberant accordion flights are an inspiring match for the singer. As before, there are diverse folk strains, jazz rhythms, and touches of prog rock – with Schaerer’s bass synth added to soaring electric guitar, cuts like the title track here or the rocker Bad Eye would not disappoint fans of Yes, especially if they were looking for more interesting vocals than that group supplied.

But they operate in several other modes, often subtly reflective and with just two or three of the players interacting with some delicacy. It’s a beguiling mix, sometimes tending to the slightly melancholic but always engaging. The tailpiece Sogna Belimo, is a simple wordless song that is both those things. Wordless? Well, it features Schaerer’s language-that-is-no-language and on this one it does become a little distracting. On reflection, that affects a few other tracks too. Ironically, unlike the first album, where your monoglot reviewer was content to ignore the words of songs in other languages and just hearken to the voice, the slow vocal here sounds as if it is wrapped round words you ought to able to discern, but cannot. The effect, for me, is not so much universal communication as a moment of post-Babel bewilderment, in which all languages have become incomprehensible. Which is to say that Schaerer’s linguistic experiment here is certainly interesting, but not perhaps entirely successful. Musically, though, it detracts only a little from another splendid album from a unique quartet.

from https://ukjazznews.com