This is the full 5 album series of trio recordings that Nels and Thollem created along with Pauline Oliveros, Michael Wimberly and William Parker.
Gowanus Session - w/William Parker on Porter Records
Radical Empathy - w/Michael Wimberly on Relative Pitch
Molecular Affinity - w/Pauline Oliveros on Roaratorio
Reality and Other Imaginary Places - w/Michael Wimberly, on ESP_disk
Gowanus Session II - w/William Parker on ESP_disk
Just released but not added yet to this collection:
The Light Is Real - w/Terry Riley on Other Minds Records (Dec. 8th, 2023)
From the liner notes for Radical Empathy by Fred Frith
"I love this record. I thought I probably would, but the reality surpassed my expectations. Maybe because so many more questions are posed and elegant solutions put forward than I had imagined before I heard it. About tuning and timbre. Density and openness. Repetition and memory. About style and genre and the nature of technique. Flashes of Larry Young and Tony Williams Lifetime when they were re-defining jazz forever. Tristano. Sharrock. Subtle alterations, treatments, processes. Relentless kinetic energy. Above all, an appreciation for how to find and hang on to your place in a narrative unfolding at speed. For the fact that structure is not what is imposed, but what is revealed. For how the recording process affects sound and performance. If empathy is the capacity for putting yourself in someone else's shoes, then these are truly empathetic players, which we hear at every twist and turn. But I'm also struck by something about physics, about the nature of mass and the strength of mutual gravitational attraction. This music seems to exist as much on that basic level as on any other, and as such it is compelling and fun. Like watching asteroids. Or blades of grass. Or shoals of fish. Or birds."
www.thollem.com/thollemclinetrio
released May 1, 2020