Toma Gouband Soloing
"Soloing, I love being free... from everything... trusting the movements that come naturally, daring to go a bit further, exploring, discovering, insisting."
Toma Gouband is a master of the lithophone, using the range of tones from the struck rocks, plus other percussive sounds, to create a rich piece that never opts for straightforward rhythms but instead features complex polyrhythms that are very gentle on the ear. At times, the sounds of the piece could easily be mistaken for a field recording of a natural phenomenon such as water dripping in an underground cavern or of a human activity such as miners at work.
As music, it can either be given full attention or it can “just be there.” In the former case, the more attention it is afforded, the more it reveals greater details and complexities; in the latter, it provides a relaxing, meditative atmosphere. Either way, it is hugely successful. (All about Jazz John Eyles)
“Un” is Gouband’s original 11-minute improvisation. Its combination of spaces and echoes and brief rolls and elisions around a drum surface and metal percussion create an extraordinary atmosphere in keeping with the underlying phenomenon being represented here—that is the rolling rocks. As it develops that sense of rolling spheres, like ball bearings on the head of a drum, the work becomes increasing mobile, increasingly evocative. If there are drum solos like this inspired by mysterious spheres, then rolling rocks become a privileged phenomenon, never to be observed, yet known, occurring in an interval of human absence. It is a percussion improvisation of unimaginable subtlety, a percussion solo of the imagination, a kind of natural phenomenon in which an artist approaches a profound mystery.
(Stuart Broomer 2025 about solo track from recording Un Peu Plus Loin)
“You don’t even have to “enter” Toma Gouband’s music: our ears (and eyes, when we have the pleasure of seeing him at work) are naturally invited by the spectacular and unheard-of arrangements of tonal colors that make up his dreamy and inventive universe: flints, natural skins of a horizontal bass drum sprinkled with little bells or blocks of wood, branches and twigs, stones rolled on the ground, inverted cymbals thus collecting all sorts of natural resonators… the hi-hat cymbals have been replaced by… stones, too…
Animated by an inner pulse made of superpositions of mysterious cycles, like so many clocks telling the time of life at poly-speed, which overlap or collide, Toma Gouband’s music transcends the idea of an imaginary territory, because it invites us to approach it like a social rite or even a loving ceremony. A masterful weaving of sound fabrics that we feel are universal, from an ancient, even prehistoric age, but also from an era to come or to become, whose visual metaphor could be those traditional Kuba fabrics from Upper-Zaire made of cloths sewn one on top of the other, to which animated patterns are added, driven by rigorous arrangements but whose craftsmanship seems to obey rules transmitted only to the initiated.
This is music initiated by the history of the world, therefore, unique, free from any sectarian constraint, and which responds only to its inner strength—a peak of musical art.
— Benoît Delbecq, November 2011
