By Nick Ostrum

Within the depths of the pandemic on December 20, 2020, London-based
saxophonist Massimo Magee conceived of a distance sequence of collaborations.
He started recording saxophone tracks – some only for himself and a few with
particular collaborators in thoughts. He then circulated the recordings to
a number of selection artists, who, over the subsequent ten months, added their very own
components. The result’s Networking.

Magee just isn’t the one musician to resort to file-share collaborations like
this through the lockdowns, quarantines and social distancing of early
2020s. It appears nearly each artistic musicians who was not doubling-down
on their solo explorations or digging again into their hard-drives and
session tapes for archival releases launched into some type of digital
collaboration venture. Some had been merely experiments. Many seemingly by no means noticed
the gentle of day in the long run. Some, nevertheless, actually labored.

Networking

is amongst the latter, partly due to the vary of musicians who partook.

Networkingbegins with Sign Flare, a 2:45 minute solo of heat,
jumpy scales that appears a jazzier nod to Braxton’s untouchable

For Alto

. Then, Magee turns to the collaborations. The primary two, Echopraxia and
Consolamentum are duos with electronicist Travis D. Johnson and
percussionist Tim Inexperienced. They take Magee recordings within the ilk of Sign
Flare and pull them into glitchier territory. Johnson appears to double
Magee’s strains including glimmering streaks and creaks to fill it out. Inexperienced
provides a busy, atmospheric percussive backdrop. Nonetheless, when Magee will get to
his collaborations with guitarist Jonathan Weizel, one thing modifications. The
cuts that observe are sparse and Magee drops the blues and scales for house
and prolonged strategies, which he follows by means of the remainder of the album,
nearly progressively, because the album strikes from the crackling digital
cascades of A.F Jonese to the uncooked sax-bass duo with Thomas Milovac and the
peculiar sound-collage of Blinkenlights, his collaboration with Lance
Austin Olsen. By this level, the sax is lowered to a sequence of hums buried
amongst varied different skittery scraps and circuitry.

The ultimate monitor, Networking Outro, is the second solo piece. The music
sounds much less hurried, and possibly extra deliberate. In a way, it brings the
album full circle, ending the wide-reaching journey that Magee and his
compadres launched into with hints of the place it began.

As pandemic restrictions are actually issues of the previous and stay music appears to
have returned to its pre-pandemic state, I’m not positive whether or not Magee and
the others (Olsen excluded) will return to this technique of creation. Then
once more, possibly that shines gentle on what, precisely, that is: a product that is
each a mirrored image of and battle in opposition to its occasions. Then once more, isn’t this
what the very best stay present, or most studio album aspires to be?

Networking

performs in that house, and, even a number of years faraway from its origins, it
works, each as a type of time-bounded (and distance-defying) narrative and
a real gem in its personal proper. It would be that we, and particularly I,
ought to cease a few of these releases primarily as Covid recordings
and begin pondering of them merely pretty much as good music.

Networkingis on the market as a CD and obtain on Bandcamp.

 
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