(Avant-Garde Jazz, Free Improvisation) [CD] Kalle Kalima & K-18 (Mikko Innanen, Veli Kujala, Teppo Hauta-aho) - Bunuel de Jour - 2014, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

"This third album featuring K-18's original line-up doesn't stray very far from the content of the previous two. But in combination with vaguely remembered images from Buñuel's films the music readily transports the listener to far corners of the aural universe with its exotic and compelling mixtures of timbre and intensity. The players are all masters of the exceptional and the unexpected and along with the sumptuous packaging, featuring on the cover and inside TUM's standard selected piece of Finnish artwork (this time by Leena Luostarinen), this album is another ticket to the strange auditory world of Berlin based composer Kalle Kalima. This time the themes of all pieces are taken from the visual world of the iconic Spanish director, Luis Buñuel.
Similar in dynamics to the earlier albums, this contains maybe more archetypal themes, where scrunchy low guitar and obtuse sax or clarinet lines undercut by haunting discordant accordion. Again similar varieties of crescendo, dissonance and weirdness push the boundaries of indulgence. Key in this respect, Mikko Innanen has made something of a name for himself in Europe as a purveyor of bizaare saxophony which is easily transferable to Kalima's off the wall compositions.
This is not to say that many pieces are lacking in melody or harmonic feel. Some evoke a distinctly meditative feeling, such as El Padre, a reference to Buñuel's own appearances in his films as a priest, as well as possible motifs of Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy. The references to the films are not intended to be categorical, and Kalima's writing in the copious liner notes explains that it is often just a mood that the film conveys which he is trying to interpret auditorially.
In accordance with the variety of Buñuel's work, and in comparison to Kalima's earlier Kubrick-and Lynch-inspired albums, as a whole this is more low key, even delicate at times. Belle de Jour has a particularly dreamy feel, with Innanen's sax played very sotto over Hauta-Aho's minimalistic bass and Kujala's ephemeral micro-toned accordion. There is as much variety here as Buñuel's own work, and enough to keep the listener dazed and intrigued."
Allaboutjazz
"K‑18 (Finnish for "a film not allowed for viewers under the age of 18") was originally formed in 2006 to perform my composition "Five Kubricks of Blood" with three of my favorite musicians, Mikko Innanen, Veli Kujala and Teppo Hauta-aho. This composition grew into a total of nine pieces inspired by the films of director Stanley Kubrick, which were then included on our first recording, Some Kubricks of Blood (TUM CD 022). Our second effort, Out to Lynch (TUM CD 030) in 2011, focused on compositions and improvisations inspired by the films of director David Lynch. Through these recordings and a number of tours and other public performances over the last few years, K-18 has also developed from a mere project into a true band.
Both Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch had been among my longstanding favorites as movie directors. However, when I started working on the third K-18 album, Luis Buñuel, a more recent acquaintance, was an obvious choice.
I only discovered the films of Luis Buñuel a few years ago. I had, of course, known of him even before that, but was simply born too late to have seen any of his films when they enjoyed considerable critical and even popular success, particularly in the 1960s and the 1970s. Luckily, I found a Buñuel box in my local video store in Berlin that mostly contained later films that he had directed during those two decades.
The first film that I watched was La voie lactée (The Milky Way, 1969). I was totally fascinated by its surreal plot. Its allusions to the role of religion in our lives were really fresh for me. Although surreal, the film has remarkable depth. Following this first exposure, I then watched all of the Buñuel films that I could find and became a fan.
For Buñuel de Jour, I picked certain essential films directed by Luis Buñuel to serve as a starting point, with each composition inspired by and named after a particular film, rather than using individual characters, locations or scenes from films as inspiration as I had done for the first two K-18 recordings. "El Padre" is an exception, as it is dedicated to Buñuel himself with no reference to a particular film.
Music was an important part of Buñuel´s early films, to such an extent that for his one silent film, Un chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929), he created a soundtrack in 1960. For this sonorized version, Buñuel included the same music (Richard Wagner´s "Liebestod" from his opera Tristan und Isolde and two South American tangos) that he himself had played on a phonograph at the film´s premiere in Paris on June 6, 1929 in front of a small by-invitation-only audience counting among its members key avant-gardists of the time, including the film´s co-creator Salvador Dalí, George Auric, Christian Bérard, Jean Cocteau, Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso and Tristan Tzara as well as André Breton and his entire surrealist entourage.
In some of his earlier films, Buñuel used music that was obviously inappropriate for the particular visual situation in which it was used, thereby creating a counter-point to it. This made music, in a way, more independent in these films and not subservient to the visual scenes by only coloring them as was and still is often the case in films.
What I really like about Buñuel´s later films in particular is that, in most cases, they only feature music when someone actually plays an instrument or a musical group performs in a particular scene or, for example, a radio or a gramophone is seen in the background. This way, music is always real in the particular scene. As a result, these later films also have long periods without any music, thereby leaving a lot of room for imagination and fresh musical ideas.
Luis Buñuel Portolés (February 22, 1900 - July 29, 1983) was a Spanish filmmaker who worked in France, Spain, the United States and Mexico. When Buñuel died at the age of 83, his obituary in the New York Times called him "an iconoclast, moralist, and revolutionary who was a leader of avant-garde surrealism in his youth and a dominant international movie director half a century later." His career was characterized by both its longevity and its amazing creativity. Still, the main targets of his social satire were consistent: the bourgeois way of life, religion and fascism in their many forms.
Buñuel´s first picture, Un chien Andalou, was made in the silent era in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, with whom Buñuel and poet Federico Garcia Lorca had formed the nucleus of the Spanish surrealist avant-garde movement in Madrid already before Buñuel moved to Paris in 1925. This first film still captivates new audiences whenever shown at film festivals or museums or by movie societies around the world, whereas his last film, Cet obscure objet du désir (That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977) - made 48 years later - was one of his greatest commercial successes and won him Best Director awards from the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics. Writer Octavio Paz, who was a strong supporter of Buñuel after he had settled in Mexico following his blacklisting in the United States, where he had lived in 1938-45, because of his alleged communist past, called Buñuel´s work "the marriage of the film image to the poetic image, creating a new reality ... scandalous and subversive."
Buñuel was a master of both silent and sound cinema, of documentaries as well as feature films, and his work spans two continents, three languages and nearly every film genre, from melodrama, satire and musical to erotica, comedy and romance, from costume drama, fantasy and crime to adventure and even western. Still, filmmaker John Huston believed that, regardless of the genre, a Buñuel film was always so distinctive as to be instantly recognizable, something that most artists can only aspire to achieve with their work regardless of the media they utilize.
I sincerely hope this music makes people interested in seeing these films again or, even better, for the first time."
Berlin, March 31, 2014
Kalle Kalima

Kalle Kalima - electric guitars
Mikko Innanen - alto saxophone (with contact mic on 04 and 10), xaphoon and whistles (02), hornpipe with contact mic (09)
Veli Kujala - quarter-tone accordion
Teppo Hauta-aho - double bass, percussion