“Why does New Age make such a big deal of coincidence? Because it’s the
cheapest form of a miracle.” – Jules Evans

A Volcanic Volition in Score is an album built on a foundation of coincidences.
When Martijn Comes and Saverio Rosi first met, they instantly noticed their
shared background: Both had spent considerable time in the Mediterranean,
and for both, these ties continued to influence their work (Rosi’s duo Lanificio
Leo was based entirely on recordings of a Calabrian textile factory).
Both, too, believed that pure sound “can express deep, unconscious visions.”
In 2016, they shared a residency at Amsterdam’s De Ruimte, which led to a
performance – and the beginnings of Volcanic Volition.
Shortly prior to the project, Rosi had been to Istanbul, where he’d collected
field recordings: Scenes at a mall, the prayer call of a muezzin. The latter in
particular turned out to be a pivotal point: when I heard the singing, it
released all my deepest memories. I thought: There must be a reason why
I’m here. They allowed their contributions to develop, gestate, evolve and
transform with remarkable patience, at times editing each other’s
contributions, then again adding new instrumental passages, samples or
recordings that seemed urgent, as Comes puts it.
Comes instantly saw a connection to another project he’d been contemplating:
A collaboration with San Francisco based composer and bassplayer
Jeffrey Roden. Roden began sending them short bass pieces, similar
in spirit and sound to his triumphant Seeds of Happiness, which had landed
him in the New York Times and on the roster of the New Albion label. When
Rosi told him that one particularly captivating melody reminded him of
Sketches of Spain, Roden was baffled. Rosi hadn’t just referenced any
album. As he put it, “as far as I know, Sketches of Spain is the only thing I
know of that is perfect.”
Rosi fleshed out the sketches into time-suspending, otherworldly miniatures,
adding atmospheric field recordings, sensual mallett sprinkles and even
ritualistic chanting. Combined with the duo pieces, the result is a dense
sound world between ambient, world music and jazz. All sense of reality and
individual attribution is lost here. As songsmith John Southworth (talking
about his own work, but almost magically related to the music at hand) put it:
“Music is film; and dream is film; and songs are birds; and birds are dreams.” Do these encounters and connections matter when listening to A Volcanic
Volition in Score? It is hard to say.
As philosopher Jules Evans has noted, weall experience coincidence at times,
like “a friend calling you when you were thinking of them.”
Maybe that’s what this album is: a creative conference call between friends
who, for an inspired moment in time, couldn’t stop thinking about each other.

Tobias Fischer