i started smiling even before i started listening. There’s playful and there’s joyful – and then there’s actual play and joy. To spend time with Alex Paxton‘s music is to enter a soundworld that’s all about the latter. It’s a world where the idea of being embarrassed, reserved, sensible or shy is nullified, cancelled out, embracing instead an outlook of uproarious, carefree abandon. That was certainly true of Paxton’s last album, the perfectly-named Happy Music for Orchestra (one of my Best Albums of 2023), and it’s a defining characteristic of everything on his new album Delicious.
There are a couple of aspects that seem to be fundamentally important throughout Delicious, and perhaps Paxton’s music in general. The first is melody – it’s everywhere – both in the form of proliferations of diverse counterpoint as well as, more often and more significantly, as a kind of united folk music, a tune to be loudly performed to the skies by anyone and everyone. The second aspect, intimately connected to this, is the importance of the group, the ensemble, the combined forces of players who in their immediacy and lack of fucks given bring to mind the restless, unruly mob-like turba of Bach’s Passions. It’s they, after all, who articulate Paxton’s assorted melodies, often as an undercurrent or thread running through an absolute cavalcade of pantomimic shenanigans. It’s impossible to listen to these pieces and not think of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, or the carnivalesque cinematic narratives of Aleksei German. Paxton’s is a similarly subversive combination of glee, mania, grotesque, eccentricity, chaos and celebration, presented with an earthy, demotic, fantastical, child-like fascination with timbre, colour and, above all, line. Nothing is off limits; there are no limits.
The way Paxton’s group dynamics are articulated is genuinely breathtaking. Everyone gets involved, for much of the time, yet there’s a never a sense that things are getting out of control. On the contrary, there’s a mysterious, even uncanny sense of mutual understanding among the musicians. They all know what they’re doing – though, perhaps, not necessarily how they’re going to do it. As such, when the music gets going the conviction that this is a unity we’re hearing is overwhelmingly strong. Melodies overlap, one idea cuts in front of another, yet the whole time one feels this is performed within a context of sympathetic music-making. Thus, overlapping melodies become decoration, elaboration, reinforcement and counterpoint; while contrasting ideas turn out not to be so disjunct as they seem at first, not always interruptions as such but part of an urge – which everyone shares – to be as creatively florid and multifaceted as possible.
Take Scrunchy Touch Sweetly to Fall (kite and finger run), which i heard at Musica Nova in February, the first movement of which (‘Touching Sweetly’) opens with a clear, recorder-like tune cutting through a network of birdsong like overlapping repetitions (with genuine birdsong putting in an appearance too). An abrupt burst of something like sped-up minimalism breaks out, but it’s like a wild shiver of excitement, and when it passes the tune and its embellishments continue as before. It soon becomes clear that we’re in shape-shifting territory, where the only urge is to sing and make merry – together. That’s reinforced more in central movement ‘Scrunchy Munchy’, where despite the impression of multiple tempi Paxton nonetheless makes it feel like everyone is wanting to crowd around and support the main idea with a proliferation of punctuations, reinforcements, adornments and other forms of generalised madcap zeal. The apex of this comes in final movement ‘Kite’, where everyone and everything dissolves in a party atmosphere of cycling refrains articulating obstreperous euphoria.
In Spit Crystal Yeast-rack dripping (à lorange), Paxton goes further, to the extent that, in its first part ‘Yeasty Pets & best Drums’, it’s as if the fundamental timbres were being re-written in real time. At one point, a tremolando turns into the sound of sawing, while in ‘Mouldy Moany Snog Drip’ pitch (unusually in this music) becomes obliterated for a time in hugely overpressured, grinding notes. As if to prove the point about group sympathy, this is made clearer through the help of voices, still remaining a mess but arriving at a final point of exuberance as if to say “we made it!”. Third movement ‘Three Horned Tooth Garden Beast Piercing’ is the most impressive, a lengthy journey passing through baroque repetitions with jaunty melodies emerging through them, again periodically broken up by hugely florid winds, but also by an unexpected lurch into 8-bit game music, in an apparent repose where we pause to play, whistle, and even eat some crisps(!), before relaunching.
It’s in the more prolonged musical structures like these that Paxton makes his strongest impression. All of this could be looked upon – not pejoratively – as, among other things, sonic confectionary (it’s not called Delicious for nothing). Yet Paxton clearly takes his silliness seriously, if i can put it like that, and this is demonstrated best in the longest pieces on the album, Levels of Affection and Shrimp BIT Baby Face.
Levels of Affection takes a deliriously pretty tune as the assertive starting point for a serious of sharp stylistic volte-faces that, as discussed previously, reveal themselves more and more to be all part of a single, united mode of expression. Thus, less than a minute into the piece, we dive into lower register moodiness, speed through fast-flowing filigree and flotsam clustered around vague but perceptible melodic strands, enter into loops less about actually getting stuck than simply caught up in rhythmic rapturous relish, and find ourselves in, of all things, a weird allusion to country when a harmonica pops up. The return to that original tune, which itself undergoes elements of face lift along the way, is what ensures continuity and coherence, alongside the aforementioned behavioural consistency of the ensemble. i guess it’s true to say that anything could happen in the course of the piece (which, wonderfully bizarrely, ends with synth pads and a burst of unhinged beats), but Paxton makes sure we never really lose our bearings – or, at least, there’s nothing to worry about; everyone’s on the same page, so just enjoy the ride.
The highlight is Shrimp BIT Baby Face, the prospect of which, at nearly 20 minutes’ duration, seems like an almost hubristic exercise in overindulgence. Yet it opens in a place that, in relation to what we hear elsewhere, feels uncomfortably strange, a noisy background and strained sounding chords; everything feels pulled taut. But it turns out to be the same tension from pulling back an elastic band, whereupon we’re propelled through a riotous series of episodes where notions of momentum, continuity and clarity are all pushed to (and beyond?) their limits. The ensemble never sounds more like a mob than here, not so much processing as rushing pell-mell only to keep pausing to reflect and sing. Again the unity, that all-pervading sense that we’re all in this together, in melody, in counterpoint, in decoration and everything else that gets hurled into the melee. But here too the ostensible superabundance of ideas is at the service of an underlying, never-ending melodic impulse, though that melody veers between extremes of tempo and demeanour.
The more times i’ve listened to Delicious the more i’ve felt it to be a wonderful riposte to a world that seems so disfunctional, individualistic, insular, and downright polite and boring. i’m not going to claim the ensembles Alex Paxton puts together are microcosms of society, though just like Bosch, Bruegel and German, there’s the palpable sense of art as teeming collectivity: ecstatic, grotesque, spontaneous, driven primarily by pure, shared energy. It testifies, loudly, to the way unity can facilitate explosive creativity. Perhaps if music can change the world, this is one of the ways it might do it. Not through a moral or political critique but a musical one: a delirious, delicious pushback against sterility, tradition, formality and inhibition, through unbounded ensemble joy.
Released in May, Delicious is available on CD and download.
