Relay by Booker Stardrum & Chris Williams
Cassette released April 2023
Digital Files below
Chris Williams and Booker Stardrum are prominent figures in the free music communities they’ve run in for years now. Stardrum, a percussionist, and Williams, a trumpeter, both swirl in the eddies of the burgeoning fourth world free electronics jazz community. On Relay, two side-long pieces, the duo hash through an icy and diffused collection of jittery motifs, splotchy melodies, muffled notions, and passing drifts. Both artists move between lyrically curious melodies and phrasings and extended technique textural foragings. Williams’ horn gurgles like a sloshed stomach in places, and then, accompanied by looped cycles of Stardrum’s toothy sampling, melodic fragments, and distant bells, Williams suddenly soars sonorous. The album is uneasy in the corners and yet these wound-up moments reveal a kind of harmonious transparency. Moments of stillness collapse into chasmal and meditative micro-percussion, bells and static, and timbral whispers. Williams’ trumpet skips like a stone over Stardrum’s frozen pond. This album is Cached’s first foray in the cassette format in order to best retain the structure and composition, the two-sidedness, of this album. Two performances by this duo of players exploring music that is written on space and swept across time; traversing every dimensional axis.
Booker Stardrum: composition, production, electronics, percussion, drums, field recordings.
Chris Williams: composition, trumpet, electronics.
Mastering: Matthew Sage
Album Cover Materials: Miranda Javid, Matthew Sage
©MMXXIV