Maurice Louca’s Elephantine was recorded in Stockholm with a twelve-piece ensemble containing two percussionists, bass, vibraphone, saxophones, bass flute, tuba, clarinets, voice, oud, violin and Louca himself on guitar and piano. Released in 2019, the record moves between written composition and improvisation while drawing musicians from Egypt, Iraq and several European countries into one ensemble.
That line between composition and improvisation interests me.
With twelve players, complete freedom could easily become chaos. Write everything down, and the individual personalities might disappear. Louca seems interested in the unstable area between those extremes, where enough structure exists for a large ensemble to move together but enough space remains for musicians to change what happens inside it.
Electronic production has a similar problem. A sequencer can organise almost everything with absolute precision, but precision is not automatically life.
Sometimes the most interesting musical system is not the one with the most control. It is the one that controls exactly enough.
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