Gareth Davis, Jan Kleefstra, Romke Kleefstra – Tongerswel

Within the last three or four years, brothers Jan and Romke Kleefstra have been involved in a slew of improv collaborations resulting in the superb ‘Wurdskrieme’ as Piiptsjilling or ‘Dat It Altyd Winter Bliuwt’ as Wink, to name but a few. In a typical setup, Jan Kleefstra recites poetry in the West Frisian language (spoken by only 500,000 people, in a northern region of the Netherlands called Friesland) while his brother Romke creates dense and sombre guitar soundscapes intertwined with their collaborators’ instruments of choice.

Every time I have encountered Jan Kleefstra’s poetry, I’ve been intensely affected by the raw power of the Frisian poet’s voice. His desolated texts, whose meaning remains elusive at best, seem to be floating in the room as if their essence had been sublimed into an aether-borne entity, only appearing through an oneiric veil. The voice is heard but words fail to make sense… and yet things are profoundly understood. Understood at the very core of the listener’s emotional machinery, conveyed by the decayed beauty of his voice – a truly enigmatic experience.

In February 2009, Jan and Romke Kleefstra invited clarinetist extraordinaire Gareth Davis to join them in an small and intimate country-side studio located at the very heart of Friesland. Romke Kleefstra had indeed been very keen to experiment with Davis’ use of bass and contrabass clarinets, and see how their timbres could potentially compliment his guitars. The recording sessions, which were spread across a couple of days, led to hours of material recorded, and the production of two records – the sublime ‘Sieleslyk’ EP released earlier this year on Rural Colours and the present full-length album ‘Tongerswel’.

In its dialogue with Davis’ bass clarinets, Romke Kleefstra’s guitar is much more narrative than in collaborative formations such as Wink or Piiptsjilling, where pedal effects usually concealed individual notes and chords, and turned them into floating structures. Here, mournful motifs are repeated over ominous clarinet swells, as the sound of Davis’ breath is often as important as the notes themselves, underlying the fragile and delicate relationship of the musician with his instrument.

The studio in which the music has been created and the room in which the music is listened to soon disappear, as we are transported alongside dark bridleways, walking alone in the silence of a land undisturbed, evoked in the first two numbers. In middle track ‘It Is Goed Sa’, Jan Kleefstra seems to be accompanying us (“Has night fallen already/now the clouds are lost and/my voice whispers”), guiding our steps towards the darkness to come, as the guitar of his brother slowly recedes beneath the surface of Davis’ shadowy clarinet. Entering the foreboding ‘Honger’, only remain the dense and foggy layers created by Davis through feedback resonances of menacing beauty, later counterpointed by Kleefstra’s ghostly delivery (“we will walk to the other side/and see that nothing’s changed”). In closing track ‘Molke’ the instrumentation becomes slightly more subdued and reverberated, enveloping the Frisian spoken words with warm overtones and delicate guitar harmonics, as if the moon had suddenly appeared from behind the clouds in its crepuscular splendour, to illuminate our final destination. As the album draws to a close, Davis‘ breathing become much more prominent dissolving delicately the preceding notes, chords and words into hazy memories, as if the silence of the night was slowly eating away at the music.

The coherence with which ‘Tongerswel’ comes across is truly breathtaking – the three artists naturally occupy their own corner whilst being completely attuned to each other, breathing like a singular entity. And it is fascinating to see how Jan Kleefstra’s poetry is so strongly influenced by Gareth Davis’ haunting clarinets. If his delivery was visceral while playing in Wink or more ethereal on an album like ‘Wurdskrieme’, this new collaboration sees him entering new territories altogether, where each of his words seem to float in front of a dark and intimate emotional backdrop, thus underlying the inescapable fragility of human condition.

- Pascal Savy for Fluid Radio.

www.homenormal.com
www.romkekleefstra.blogspot.com
www.myspace.com/davisgareth