The history of electronic music is mottled with jazz influences, from the samples, rhythms and moods that subtly flavoured Moodymann and Terrence Dixon productions to the lush, seductive sway of Four Tet-esque electronica from the 2000s and 2010s. While dreamlike fusions of jazz and sundry electronic variants, especially ambient music continue proliferating – Floating Points’ 2021 opus Promises with Pharoah Sanders comes to mind – the truly interesting things happen on the fringes, where musicians like Hprizm and now Tullis Rennie splice and recombine the musics’ genes into ingenious hybrids.
Similar to Hprizm’s repurposing of recordings from a free improv concert with drummer Gerald Cleaver and bassist Brandon Lopez into fascinating electronic abstractions on 2023’s In The Wilderness, Rennie sources his material from a day-long session of improvisations held in June 2023 to then recast it in the form of woozy club bangers. Performed by violinist Preetha Narayanan, cellist Tara Franks, saxophonists Cath Roberts and Dee Byrne, and Rennie himself on electronics, the electroacoustic music at the core of Safe Operating Space is folksy, distantly jazzy, and expansively droning. The sound on the two tracks that feature unaltered recordings, ‘Precarity’ and ‘Scarcity’, is understated and patient. Rennie’s studio interventions and transformations made using analogue electronics are anything but.
This contrast is perhaps most evident on the album opener ‘Sometime Too Hot’, which sees Rennie sculpt booming electronica phrases from the nervous vibration of bowed strings and saxophone yelps that float in and out of focus. The rhythms that shuffle through the track, rocking its central mass back and forth, are deep and insistent yet curiously unstable. And the atmosphere? Decidedly heady – as if we were listening to an intergalactic visitor’s attempt at appropriating the dancefloor.
Having worked as a trombonist, composer of contemporary classical music, free improviser, electronic producer, field recordist, and sound artist, Rennie is a musical polyglot, which proves crucial as he confidently juggles genres to reveal their tropes and inner workings. On ‘Asunder’, subsurface detonations make tiny plink and plonk particles jump up and down like sand granules through a sieve. Elsewhere, ‘Do You Wanna Hear About The Deal That I’m Making?’ frames crepuscular saxophone licks within compressed, squelching clatter and a walking cello bass line
The album’s title references planetary boundaries within which life on Earth is possible. Along with the names of several of the cuts therein, it gestures towards a concern with our current climate – both meteorological and cultural. This existential dread seeps into the pieces as an undertow of foreboding, threatening pulses and textures. On ‘Vital Signs’, ecosocial anxieties manifest as elastic syncopations that bounce behind majestic string and brass crescendos. Meanwhile, ‘Deepreal’ simultaneously sounds as amusingly on the nose and troubled as its name would suggest. Here, AI-averse screams of unknown provenance hide behind a messy electronic flow that thrashes aimlessly akin to a clubgoer that has had enough but took too much and just can’t stop.
In spite of all odds, Rennie’s outlook is ultimately optimistic. “This music is inspired by the beautifully human endeavour of trying to grab hold of unrepeatable moments,” he reveals in the promotional bumf accompanying the album. Focusing on the playful pops of slap-tongued saxophone that get fashioned into a beat on ‘Blunt Shears’ or following the flight of ebullient synth lines on ‘An Array Of Buckets’, you might even begin to believe him – just as the threat of a collapsing world resurfaces behind the colourful façade.
