Artist
Evan Parker, Matthew Wright, Adam Linson, John Coxon, Ashley Wales, Trance Map+
Bristol, United Kingdom
Evan Parker, Matthew Wright, Adam Linson, John Coxon, Ashley Wales, Trance Map+ is a music group from Bristol, United Kingdom. Their discography on Gatefold includes 12 records.
12
Albums tracked
0
In collections
—
Since
Biography
Evan Parker basically turned the soprano saxophone into a goddamn synthesizer before those things had reliable power supplies. He realized early on that if he didn't stop to breathe, he could create these interlocking, multi-layered patterns that sound like three people playing at once. It’s not just circular breathing—it’s a physical endurance test where the spit and the reed and the room acoustics become the primary instruments. Trance Map+ is where that mechanical obsession hits the digital wall. By bringing in Matthew Wright and the Spring Heel Jack guys like John Coxon and Ashley Wales, Parker isn't just improvising over a beat; he’s feeding his horn into a live processing engine. It’s a mess of signal chains and live sampling that would’ve been impossible in the 70s. This isn't some polite late-career crossover; it's a claustrophobic, glitchy evolution of the same acoustic feedback loops he's been chasing for fifty years.
The Arc of Evan Parker, Matthew Wright, Adam Linson, John Coxon, Ashley Wales, Trance Map+
The pivots — what forced Evan Parker, Matthew Wright, Adam Linson, John Coxon, Ashley Wales, Trance Map+ to reinvent.
The Incus Breakaway
After the Topography of the Lungs session in 1970, the tension between the free jazz traditionalists and the European improv scene hit a boiling point. Parker co-founded Incus Records with Derek Bailey because they needed a house for music that didn't give a shit about American swing or blues scales. This was the era of pure, serrated noise where they treated the instruments like scrap metal, stripping away melody until only the friction remained.
The Solo Soprano Architecture
By the time he tracked Saxophone Solos and Monoceros in the mid-to-late 70s, Parker stopped looking for outside collaborators to fill the space. He mastered circular breathing and overtones to the point where he could generate rhythmic pulses and high-frequency chirps simultaneously on a single soprano sax. This shift turned his live sets into marathon sessions of acoustic phase-shifting that forced the listener to abandon traditional ideas of time.
The Electro-Acoustic Shift
The 1990s brought a hardware reality check when Parker started integrating signal processing into his ensembles, most notably on the ECM sessions. Instead of just reacting to other players, he started reacting to ghosts of his own playing reflected through electronics. This culminated in the Trance Map projects where the laptop became as essential as the reed, blurring the line between a physical performance and a post-production remix in real-time.
Influences
- John Coltrane — Parker has repeatedly cited Coltrane's late-period sheets of sound and his use of the soprano sax as the spark for his own exploration. You hear it in the vertical density of Parker’s playing, taking Coltrane’s harmonic stacks and pushing them into pure texture. He basically took 'Meditations' and decided to see how much further he could stretch the physical limits of the horn.
- Paul Desmond — It sounds like a joke given how smooth Desmond was, but Parker has specifically pointed to Desmond's control of the altissimo register as a technical blueprint. He took that precision and used it to manipulate high-frequency split-tones that should be physically impossible. It’s the same obsession with the upper reaches of the instrument, just stripped of the cocktail lounge vibe.
- Steve Lacy — Lacy was the guy who proved the soprano saxophone could be a primary, serious vehicle for modernism outside of the bebop tradition. Parker took Lacy’s disciplined, straight-horn focus and weaponized it with circular breathing. Without Lacy’s initial work reclaiming the soprano from being a novelty instrument, Parker’s solo career wouldn't have had a foundation.
- Albert Ayler — The raw, vibrato-heavy energy of Ayler’s mid-60s ESP-Disk recordings provided the permission for the European scene to get ugly. Parker absorbed Ayler’s disregard for the 'correct' way to blow into a mouthpiece, using those multiphonics as a starting point for his own more clinical, rhythmic experiments. It’s Ayler’s spirit filtered through a much more mathematical brain.
- Anton Webern — Parker has frequently referenced the Second Viennese School and Webern’s structural brevity in interviews regarding how he organizes his improvisations. You hear it in the way he handles silence and sudden bursts of activity—it’s a compositional mindset applied to total chaos. He isn't just 'jamming'; he's applying a serialist’s rigor to free improvisation.
Discography
Their records — most-collected first.
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