Carbon Records
CR304
As Stapleton's illness progressed over his last years, instead of lamenting what doors had closed to him, Stapleton with the truest, highest understanding of what free improvisation suggests, asked himself what doors remained open and walked through them. Stapleton entered a grand tradition of master improvisers for whom changes in physical ability were approached with the same practical acuity that a great improviser approaches their instrument with every time they play: what are the tools at hand? And what can be said with them? This was not a leap of faith, but an understanding – an understanding based on a lifetime spent in love with the promise of art. This approach is the highest application of the practice of improvised music. In his ability to turn a physical limitation into the driver of avenues previously unexplored, Peter Stapleton resides in the company of such masters as Masahiko Togashi, Derek Bailey, Linda Sharrock, and Keith Rowe.
And as a result of this we have with us this gift of an album, Eye's final: Black Ships. But the truth is, Peter had been exploring drumless electronic abstraction for two decades – his drumming was so startling that few noticed his electronic tendencies. And so in Black Ships we have the pleasure of hearing a direction in Stapleton's work at length that was only previously hinted at. Languid pools of mystery and menace circle nebulously. Guitar and synth spread and flatten, slipping in to the cracks of your surroundings as if they've been waiting for the tension to let up for just this very purpose. Porteous' guitar continuums draw one into the frosty warehouse chilblains of Dunedin. Practice spaces from which the chill never departs unless the band generates sufficient energy. The cool darkness, the intensity, the gothic drama – without the relentless forward motion of Stapleton's drums – it's all still here. The only tragedy is that it makes one realize how much ground Eye still had to cover. Black Ships is a triumph. Clutching the thread of the moment in the face of adversity and from that thread making something utterly, absolutely alive. A surging triumphant affirmation of art as a tool of human agency and self-definition. A celebration of being truly, radically present.
