FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Quicksails' New Ambient Jazz Album Finds Peace in Chaos

'Mortal' uses syrupy synthesizers and swelling saxophones to tell the story of "a year of upheaval."

The Chicagoan composer Ben Billington is nominally a drummer. He's best known for frantic free jazz and acidic experimental exercises as a member of the midwest avant heroes, Tiger Hatchery, as well as in collaborations under his own name. But over the past couple years it's become clear that he's not quite that easy to pin down. He's also played a bunch for the freaked noise project Ono, and he's taken to collaborating with Wolf Eyes' resident saxophonist John Olson—another figure trudging on the line between jazz and outer realms. Recently he started booking a series of shows in Chicago called Resonance, which leans toward experimental electronics, but takes a pretty wide approach to what that means—a future bill features, incredibly, both Teklife's DJ Manny and the concussed noise jazz duo Moth Cock.

Advertisement

I first saw Billington hanging around Detroit's Trip Metal Fest (the experimental music paradise that ran concurrently to Movement last May), passing out the hundreds of Trip Metal buttons he'd printed off of his own accord, which sort of explains the disparateness of his musical impulses. Like that festival's utopian vision (booking Hieroglyphic Being alongside members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, just a night after the synth legend Morton Subotnick), Billington's approach to experimental music takes the freakiest strains of every genre and treats them all with equal reverence. He'll throwing a sax solo on a drone track; he makes ambient records that swing.

The Chicagoan composer Ben Billington is nominally a drummer. He's best known for frantic free jazz and acidic experimental exercises as a member of the midwest avant heroes, Tiger Hatchery, as well as in collaborations under his own name. But over the past couple years it's become clear that he's not quite that easy to pin down. He's also played a bunch for the freaked noise project Ono, and he's taken to collaborating with Wolf Eyes' resident saxophonist John Olson—another figure trudging on the line between jazz and outer realms. Recently he started booking a series of shows in Chicago called Resonance, which leans toward experimental electronics, but takes a pretty wide approach to what that means—a future bill features, incredibly, both Teklife's DJ Manny and the concussed noise jazz duo Moth Cock.

I first saw Billington hanging around Detroit's Trip Metal Fest (the experimental music paradise that ran concurrently to Movement last May), passing out the hundreds of Trip Metal buttons he'd printed off of his own accord, which sort of explains the disparateness of his musical impulses. Like that festival's utopian vision (booking Hieroglyphic Being alongside members of the Sun Ra Arkestra, just a night after the synth legend Morton Subotnick), Billington's approach to experimental music takes the freakiest strains of every genre and treats them all with equal reverence. He'll throwing a sax solo on a drone track; he makes ambient records that swing.

His solo project Quicksails, running in various forms since 2011, has been an outlet to pursue all of those disparate impulses at once. Most often that results in work that's bracing and chaotic, nauseous burbles of synthesizer gunk gumming up clattering drum lines. But Mortal, Billington's newest album under the moniker, is a special achievement in a career of twitchy explorations of outer zones. The record was conceived during a "year of intense personal upheavals"—the Bandcamp page for the release compares some of its moments to claustrophobia and migraines—but there's an overwhelming optimism to much of what Billington's working with here. There's peace and optimism in the sequenced locomotion of tracks like "Valley Voice." Even as multitracked saxophone lines wind around some of the more high-pitched synth lines, the bracing moments play in blissful slow motion—a distant memory of bad times, rather than reliving them in HD.

Billington allows himself some real panic on "Left Temple," which opens with the bashing of a gong, before diving through chattering spoken-word samples and brittle electronics—a moment of anxious purge somewhere amidst the bliss. But this too passes, settling into the more gentle plod of the record's closing track "Mortality Sweep"—a suggestion, maybe, that all chaos subsides, and on the other side there's tranquility, or something like it.

Quicksails' Mortal is out today on vinyl on the Chicago label Hausu Mountain, which you can snag on their site or stream on their Bandcamp.

His solo project Quicksails, running in various forms since 2011, has been an outlet to pursue all of those disparate impulses at once. Most often that results in work that's bracing and chaotic, nauseous burbles of synthesizer gunk gumming up clattering drum lines. But Mortal, Billington's newest album under the moniker, is a special achievement in a career of twitchy explorations of outer zones. The record was conceived during a "year of intense personal upheavals"—the Bandcamp page for the release compares some of its moments to claustrophobia and migraines—but there's an overwhelming optimism to much of what Billington's working with here. There's peace and optimism in the sequenced locomotion of tracks like "Valley Voice." Even as multitracked saxophone lines wind around some of the more high-pitched synth lines, the bracing moments play in blissful slow motion—a distant memory of bad times, rather than reliving them in HD.

Billington allows himself some real panic on "Left Temple," which opens with the bashing of a gong, before diving through chattering spoken-word samples and brittle electronics—a moment of anxious purge somewhere amidst the bliss. But this too passes, settling into the more gentle plod of the record's closing track "Mortality Sweep"—a suggestion, maybe, that all chaos subsides, and on the other side there's tranquility, or something like it.

Quicksails' Mortal is out today on vinyl on the Chicago label Hausu Mountain, which you can snag on their site or stream on their Bandcamp.