Wolf Eyes x Anthony Braxton - live at pioneer works, 26 october 2023 (2025) [HiRes]

Nate Young and John Olson as Wolf Eyes have worked with pretty much everybody from alternative rockers like Sonic Youth and Andrew W.K. to fellow noise totems like Merzbow, Black Dice and Prurient or the experimental hip hop-adjacent duo Model Home, yet there are few artists as formidable or as apparently well suited to their sound as the legendary saxophonist Anthony Braxton, with whom they first collaborated at a music festival in Quebec in the spring of 2005.

Braxton had reportedly cleared out their merchandise table a year earlier at a festival in Sweden upon his first introduction to the band, and at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville the following May he found time to sit in on their set between his own scheduled performances with Fred Firth and his sextet, as part of an event curated by the Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore. The resulting album was released in 2006 as the critically acclaimed Black Vomit, with Olson stating ‘his language on the saxophone is just insane. There is nothing he can’t do on the horn. It was a perfect match’ while Braxton remarked Wolf Eyes to him ‘felt like family immediately. The communication was immediate’.

Two of the most prolific acts around, Wolf Eyes and Braxton have continued to perform together in recent years, with a live set from Los Angeles released by the Michigan duo last year as the fifth volume of their collaborative enterprise Difficult Messages. Another live recording offered up this week by ESP-Disk proves more substantial, as it captures Wolf Eyes and Braxton over two long sides, each approaching twenty minutes, at Pioneer Works in the Red Hook neighbourhood of Brooklyn on 26 October 2023, as part of the False Harmonics series on a night which also featured Hieroglyphic Being, Mesa Ritual and MV Carbon.

The first side of the record showcases Braxton’s furring and serrated horn as he switches readily between the alto, sopranino and bass saxophones over a bed of amorphous drones on pipes and electronics. A saxophonist in his own right, Olson is also known for his homemade instruments and as an adept of electronic winds, with Wolf Eyes in recent times dubbing their sound ‘psycho jazz’ or ‘horror music’ like on the 2023 album Dreams In Splattered Lines, which they described as a fusion of ‘DIY electronics with the avant-garde sensibilities of Fluxus and the granite of dreary Midwestern life’.

Those pipes laden with effects serve to produce bold industrial textures redolent of blast furnaces with their molten ooze, the hissing of gaskets and vents, piston pumps or sparks which sputter and fly out the ends of fraying cables. A pummelling low end, wrought through electronics and the bass sax, vies with wailing top lines which might stem from Young’s treated vocals and harmonica, but most of all emerge through the piercing tones of Braxton’s sopranino, as the first side of Live at Pioneer Works briefly sounds like an electrocuted rooster in the middle of a thunderstorm.

But there are also quieter moments, lulls where they briefly recharge their lithium batteries and more winnowing trills which stretch out over ghastly strings and pipes, plus some tribal percussion which seems to portend the next drone or breakdown. Over the course of their thirty-five-minute set, the trio of Young and Olson with Braxton cover most of the possibilities of their respective instruments as Braxton splutters and squeals against walls of static, or mimics the sound of birdcalls whose authors plume and fly above electronic wastelands or a neon shrub, as more industrial throbs and hums conclude the long opening.

For the second side Braxton squawks in short spurts over swarming crickets and an oscillating sub-bass drone, before a few foghorn blasts give way to sloshing waves and the dredging of silt, on a track which sounds more submerged and watery. Seagulls soar overhead and the electronics whoosh in the leaden air as the piece evokes the album’s cover painting, Down Yonder (Blue) by the Saginaw artist and educator Matthew Zivich which in cubist fashion depicts what may well be a revolution or rout, as a coastal assault in shades of blue abounds in upturned muskets and strewn bodies.

Anthony Braxton: alto, sopranino & bass saxophones
Johnny Olson: pipes & electronics
Nate Young: electronics, vocals & harmonica