Odu: Vibration II

What kind of thing—what type of music, what category of experience—is Chris Williams’ Odu: Vibration II? Depending where you find yourself in the six-track suite’s 39-minute sprawl, it might resemble a drone piece, an improvisation, or a group meditation; perhaps a ritual, a seance, or a lament. Descending into its hidden depths, you might decide that it’s an exercise in deep listening or an explosion of linear timekeeping. As boundaries dissolve between instruments and players, you might even wonder if you’ve caught a glimpse of ego death.

Williams is a trumpet player and electroacoustic composer working in the overlap between disciplines and traditions. On the 2021 album Sans Soleil, with saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi, he broke free improv down to a language of refracted light and rustling stalks, harnessing the smallest sounds that could come from a horn. In the Remembrance Quartet, he’s thrown himself into the collective maelstrom of a spiritual quest. On 2022’s ‘Live’, he followed Jeff Parker’s studio-savvy lead, distilling live ensemble recordings into a concentrated dose of groove-forward jazz. But Odu: Vibration II is Williams’ strongest statement as a composer to date—an expansive and enveloping longform fusion of ambient atmospheres, otherworldly soundscaping, and some of the cleanest, purest tones that brass and reeds can produce.

Williams and his collaborators—saxophonist Shiroishi and trombonist Kalia Vandever—recorded the bulk of the album live at New York’s Roulette Intermedium, but Odu: Vibration II doesn’t particularly sound like a live recording. Perhaps that’s due to the extensive effects processing that all three players use; perhaps it’s simply because it’s hard to square the idea of this airy, ethereal sound with anything as prosaic as a concert venue, even one as welcoming as Roulette, with its gracefully arched proscenium and wooden floors. Williams has described the shape of the album as a metaphorical descent into a cave—an experience whose mythic dimensions feel much more in keeping with the vastness the players conjure.

The album unfolds with the patience of a long tracking shot, fostering the illusion of being swallowed up by darkness. Opener “Moon” begins with a rich, buzzing synthesizer drone and the huff of naked breath through a horn; as the chord expands, revealing new frequencies, Williams sketches the tentative outline of a minor-key melody before he’s joined by the searching cries of his bandmates. Run through titanic reverb, their horns float over the jagged sawtooth landscape of the nine-minute tone poem.

Compared to the ominous penumbra of “Moon,” “Visage” is a tribute to the clarion gleam of three-horn music; the players weave an elegiac succession of slowly shifting harmonies enlivened by unexpected tonal pivots and slow-motion soloing from Vandever. It’s as graceful as Stars of the Lid. After that melodic highlight, the candle snuffs out, and we’re plunged into darkness. Williams has described Odu as “a process of unraveling,” and “location.echo” bears that out: All tonal elements fall away as the music breaks down into hissing breath, percussive taps, and what sounds like bat wings flapping and many-legged critters rustling in the shadows.

In an interview with Foxy Digitalis, Williams admitted of his experiences spelunking, “It freaked me out.” That fear was one of the reasons he was drawn to the idea of caves in the first place. Where much of his work is rooted in lived experience and family history, he said, “This cave thing just feels like a primal, I’m just a human being that’s afraid of the dark.” The second half of the album ventures deeper still, offering a perpetually shifting array of sounds, ideas, and treacherous terrain. In the brief “Waning,” Williams solos lyrically against a backdrop of nature recordings and clanging bells before “Stemmed outwards” destroys all certainties: For nearly 15 minutes, staticky bursts and squiggles twist in elliptical loops that recall Philip Jeck or late-’90s Mille Plateaux, until Shiroishi claws his way through with a harrowing solo.

But if it’s nameless dread that animates “Stemmed outwards,” that makes the two-minute conclusion, “Stemmed inwards,” all the more striking. After the penultimate track’s crushing avalanche of stalactites, the regal three-part harmonies of “Stemmed inwards” feel like reemerging into the sunlight, grateful to breathe fresh air. Whatever narrative structure Williams had in mind for the album—and to the record’s benefit, he keeps it vague—here at the end there’s a clear sense of having gone through something transformative. That cathartic quality elevates Odu: Vibration II above legions of merely atmospheric electroacoustic compositions. Here, it’s not just the darkness that matters; it’s the fact of having survived it together.