The maverick composer and instrument builder Harry Partch once described his creative lodestar as “the actions and activities of primitive man as I imagine him.” Whether this impulse to flee modernity takes form in Constantin Brâncuși’s sculptures, Hilma af Klimt’s paintings, or Partch’s instruments, there will always be artists who seek inspiration on the shores of ancient custom and spiritual communion. Primal Forms, the new album by Sam Shackleton and Wacław Zimpel, is awash in this sensibility. The album’s folkish minimalism often recalls the so-called Fourth World of Jon Hassell, whose music David Toop called “almost psychotropic in its capacity to activate alien worlds in the imagination.” Shackleton casts a similarly hallucinogenic spell. Though the English artist was once associated with dubstep through his and Appleblim’s old Skull Disco label, his “ultimate destination” as an artist, as he told The Wire in 2010, was actually toward Partch—in short, a musical language he could call his own. On Primal Forms, Shackleton and Zimpel walk the path as though they’ve always known the way.
Though Shackleton and Zimpel are serial collaborators, they both sound notably renewed on Primal Forms, their first recording together. Zimpel, a Polish jazz composer and clarinetist whose past work includes an EP with Border Community’s James Holden and two albums of Carnatic fusion, has brought a refreshing lightness to Shackleton’s music. Since 2016’s Devotional Songs, the pagan arcana of Shackleton’s music has often been given shape by singers and poets. But, whatever the quality of their contributions, the music’s atmosphere had grown thick with “gothic” imagery that felt, in Susan Sontag’s phrasing, constructed rather than secreted. Shackleton’s last album, 2017’s Anika-featuring Behind the Glass, could sometimes feel like what one Discogs commenter described as the soundtrack for a Victorian funeral, but here, Zimpel’s use of the Ukrainian lira, harmonium, violin, and other instruments suggestive of folk traditions add a celebratory force to the English artist's Escher-corridor minimalism.
This all leads to an improbable thought: Zimpel has made the often dour Shackleton sound lovely. Once you’re past the title track’s chilly intro—its crime-noir strum might remind you of Portishead’s “Sour Times”—Zimpel’s alto clarinet and digi-choral swells add a penetrating warmth, as though the shade that Shackleton’s music usually inhabits has vanished beneath a second sun. The clarinet’s presence elsewhere sets in motion a passage of disembodying awe. Within a simple monochord loop four minutes through “Primal Drones,” Zimpel’s reed undulates with a conversational sonority—as though, if only you could tune to the proper frequency, it might be possible to make out a centuries-old haiku.
Though Primal Forms has lots of trance-inducing intensity—see the Terry Riley-esque organ spirals towards the back of “Primal Forms”—the transitory moments are a pleasure, too. The midsection of the final track, “Ruined Future,” is a longish changeover from Zimpel’s thinning clarinet to rolling marimba triplets. In taking its time to get from A to B, Shackleton and Zimpel show the confidence to let nothing much happen for a while. Perhaps by this point the duo’s destination, a prelapsarian place of mystical sound and ritual beauty akin to the one Partch longed to discover, is already in sight. If so, the duo found it not by following a map but by awakening neglected instincts in each other.
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