Bree Van Reyk: Superclusters | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- If it seems like Bree Van Reyk has a lot of projects orbiting her musical world, it’s because she does. Fossicking through the internet I’ve heard her in chamber ensembles and performing electronica and idm; doing avant-garde percussion or composing whole operas; I even managed to travel back twenty years and hear her slow-core, sad-core, post-rocking in her band The Rebel Astronauts (which sounded pretty good, to be honest). When I run across a musical chameleon like Bree -really what hasn’t she got on her CV, I think she actually founded a school of rock for girls a few years ago- it often surprises me to discover that in all they’ve done, they haven’t, till now, released their solo, debut album; so it is with Bree. It’s solo in that it’s under her name,  although this collaborator-by-nature has gathered, literally, a small orchestra of her friends with a crowded constellation of complex sounds for what is quite adequately described as Superclusters.

Van Reyk’s description of the process sounds almost as abstract as the result:

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In writing each of the parts that make up Superclusters my aim was simply to start from where the previous part had ended and see what would happen next through listening and improvisation. What eventuates as a composition (piece/part/track) is arrived at through a repeated practice of firstly finding a mode of sound-making that feels like the right thing to do at the time, then listening and finding the sounds that feel like the right thing to do next, to infinity. I want to establish semi-static sonic spaces and explore what is around the edges of them - what is hiding, what is emerging, what is next along the pathway.
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Breaking down just what that means, Van Reyk says she worked with a bunch of collaborators in groups larger or smaller -often it came down to just Bree and her violinist friend Véronique Serret to create and record the musical bedrock- tracks which they and others would then listen back to, then record some more, then listen again and so on, in lots of discrete sessions. It’s a kind of time-dilated call-and-response version of improvisation, if you will. As you can see from the record sleeve, the final list of personnel is … a lot. I think many of them were involved via files shot back and forth across the internet, which has become just about the go-to recording technique for musical team-ups during the pandemic. The list includes luminaries such as Mick Turner and Jim White of Dirty Three (among many other projects), both of whom, ironically, I think have actually been busier during the time of lockdown than before and they’re certainly among those sending a vast number of recordings across the ether.

It wouldn’t be surprising, given their involvement, that Superclusters, along with its avant-garde percussion and ambient soundscaping, has a feel that I can’t help but associate with post-rock. The genre loves a long, slow-burning crescendo and even, sometimes, a diminuendo and the dynamic pulsing of the music here is like that of a young, living and breathing little galaxy. The liner notes describe a quality of duality in Van Reyk’s composition which I think is apropos: “[a] knack for noticing the little things and their counterpoints. Darkness and light, pain and pleasure, reality and escape.” It’s a tendency I feel sure is deeply embedded in her music, in Superclusters and beyond.

There are certainly little things in this record, Van Reyk talks of ants and dust, which you can hear in the skittering, particulate, poly-rhythms. They have their tiny place amidst the cyclopean soundscapes created by soaring winds and strings. The micro and macrocosm are, much like each element forming the totality of Bree Van Reyk’s back-catalogue, stuffed with unexpected diversity and detail. At every moment, whether you think your’re looking down at a line of rhythmically moving insects or gazing into the vastness of a nebula, there’s a lot to take in, in the Superclusters of Bree Van Reyk.

- Chris Cobcroft.