Since their inception in the late 1990s, Food have been the proverbial movable feast. What started out as basically an acoustic quartet has been pared down to a core duo – English saxophonist Iain Ballamy and Norwegian drummer Thomas Strønen – who have compensated by gradually introducing more electronic elements and sound processing, with guest collaborators drafted in for specific projects.
But the constant has been the almost reverential way in which Food treat empty space: even at its most frenetic, the duo’s sound seems to emanate from a dark, melancholic silence. Ballamy’s notes hang in a pristine emptiness, like foghorns on a cloud bank, and Strønen’s grooves drift in and out of coherence, as if waiting for the fog to clear.
This Is Not A Miracle, their eighth release, is principally the work of Strønen. With Ballamy and Austrian guitarist Christian Fennesz, the drummer recorded hours of improvised material (with the help of electronica specialist engineer Ulf Holand of David Bowie, Satyricon and Motorpsycho fame) and then spent months reworking it, taking saxophone and guitar fragments and refashioning them into shorter, more structured statements – most of the album's 11 tracks come in at about four minutes.
“Often when we play live”, says Strønen, “we develop a mood over quite a long time. Now, instead of taking time to find out where to go, I wanted to go there directly, with a clear idea. I wanted to make something that was close to our best improvised moments live, but expressed as shorter passages. So I cut the music to the bone.”
But if all that suggests a lack of human warmth, one listen is enough to dispel the accusation.
Ballamy is a saxophonist who, whether he is playing this “future jazz” or English folk melodies with the superb Quercus trio (also appearing in Cork), can invest the simplest phrase with warmth and meaning. His plangent horn floated over Strønen’s industrial grooves and Fennesz’s layers of processed guitar is like a distant sun breaking through the dark clouds.
