The Supplicants - Formless (2023)

Ten thousand years ago, the Supplicants carved themselves from stone to begin quietly and continuously humming the song of our collective subconscious. Recognizing our hidden pasts and futures, they recorded their first musical encounter remaining devoted to the profound musical act of pure in-the-moment improvisation. For the ensuing twenty years, woven between their contributions to other bands around the world, the Supplicants were able to come together in the Bay Area of California to hold and sanctify performance spaces with sound whenever possible. In that time, the Supplicants have constructed a highly personal architecture of gesture, emotion, resonance and intuition that both complicates and simplifies the core frequencies of certain entities, people, animals and plants; that make up their secret target audiences. The Supplicants, in communion with these active listeners, gently fold and unfold pasts and futures into the shape of the present moment with passionate expressions of love, joy, sadness, recollection and forgiveness.
Now, through good fortune and faithful perseverance, the Supplicants are happy to announce the uncovering of an entirely new set of recordings. Their hope and intention is for future generations, embedded within their listeners, to find and take shelter in these shapes, colors and sounds in their time of greatest need. To commemorate the 20 year span from their last studio albums recording, The Supplicants present four new offerings that reveal the depth of their commitment to creating compelling, improvised, spiritual Afro-Indo jazz. Each track is an expansive sonic world unto itself. Taken as a whole, the new releases lead the listener on a sensory journey through the emotional intellectual vibrations of four musicians focused on the subatomic act of pure improvisation. Each musical gesture is a call to a response, a reaction to an action. The horns sing and shout in a jubilee dialogue as they ride the waves of polyrhythmic propulsion orchestrated by the bass and drums. The collective listening is outstanding, the playing is cosmically virtuosic. This is truly soul music channeled from the ancestors, born in the moment, of the moment.
There are no preconceived structures or rules dictating these proceedings. The Supplicants move as ONE, in service of the music and the magic that happens when musicians trust the process of unfettered imagination and creativity.