A MARVEL OF COLOR

Is improvisation a product of freedom, or is it instead an expression of the struggle to be free? Perhaps this is a chicken-and-egg question, and maybe it doesn’t matter too much, since improvisation and freedom cannot exist without each other: to improvise is to break free. Singer Sanne Rambags captures the process perfectly with the words, “It’s over now – and I am free.” And the way cellist Vincent Courtois and drummer Julian Sartorius lend Rambags’ incomparable voice an even greater depth and intensity – partly by doing their own thing – speaks volumes about how wonderfully these three musicians connect and communicate in an uncertainty that is overwhelming.
In any given pop song, the line, “It’s over now – and I am free,” would be a clichéd reference to the details of a broken personal relationship or some such. But here, in the interplay of percussion, cello and voice, the words are about something universal: there is no freedom without farewell, there is no freedom without loss.
Oh, what an overwhelmingly intimate album this is!
Oh, how seemingly loosely sung and played, with no holds barred.
There is a shift in the song “I Am Free”, when the trio twice changes register slightly, most notably in the way Rambags, with her highly intimate way of singing, suddenly transforms the whispered vocals into guttural sounds that are just as intense. Both ways of singing are intimate and make loss palpable. And always we have Courtois’s cello and Sartorius’s percussion to emphasize and contradict Rambags’s sounds and words. It’s serious stuff. Freedom is won from not just any loss, and cello, vocals and percussion accentuate the contradiction found in those two phrases: “It’s over now – and I am free,” underscoring not only regained strength and vitality, but also melancholy, the pain of farewell.
Twigs is the trio’s first album. This makes it all the more remarkable that Rambags, Courtois and Sartorius never forget for a moment that they are part of a whole. The freedom to which every note bears testament never – not even for a beat – leads to individualism. This togetherness manifests itself in an ever-tangible concentration. The three never fail to listen to each other.
Above all else, Twigs is a very poetic album, where “poetic” means embracing the incompatible, letting the contradictory exist in harmony. There is a constant contrast between freedom and concentration, as well as between freedom and form. The composed pieces, with their pop- and folk-like feel, seem to want to break free of their structure. On the other hand, the improvised pieces are performed with such attention that their freedom never leads to formlessness. Rambags, Courtois and Sartorius prove to be a match made in heaven thanks to the immense flexibility not only of their musical mindset but especially of their sound palette. Even when the trio plays in a restrained way, this album is a marvel of color. Never excessive, but always very intense.

Mischa Andriessen