Believe - Spirits Of The Dead Are Watching

2025

BELIEVE’s debut album ‘Spirits of the Dead are Watching’ is a potent statement from four of Australia’s most experienced and dedicated improvisers. A powerhouse unit of rare intimacy, flexibility and passion, BELIEVE connects the spectrum of contemporary creative sound making with the fluid, anything is possible momentum of free jazz.

Peter Farrar - Alto Saxophone/Percussion 
Novak Manojlovic - Piano/Percussion 
Clayton Thomas - Double Bass/Percussion 
Laurence Pike - Drums/Percussion  

At its most interactive and imaginative, spontaneously created music can be as organic as the wind in the trees or the roar of the waves. But to reach beyond the common self-consciousness of humans making “art” requires letting go of self, of ego and of preconceptions. The player must exist entirely in the moment and in the music’s midst, hearing it as a whole, rather than concentrating on his or her part.

Believe consists of four of the most polished and yet primal improvisers Sydney has produced: alto saxophonist Peter Farrar, pianist Novak Manojlovic, bassist Clayton Thomas and drummer Laurence Pike. The polish comes not only in the mastery of their instruments, but in their interaction. They don’t pounce on each other’s ideas, for pouncing’s too slow; the moment’s already passed. They play simultaneous ideas that form a mosaic of accord.

The primality comes in the way the music shakes up your central nervous system, from brain to coccyx. Key to this is the sounds they make. Farrar, one of the half-dozen most significant saxophonists the country’s ever produced, generates a warmth of timbre and breadth of overtones that can make his alto sound like a tenor. Add his circular breathing and extended techniques, and the instrument, at the opening of the title track, bellows like some distraught beast, and sounds like it’s not being played, so much as is somehow playing itself. With Manojlovic’s piano – whether he’s using the keys or plucking the strings, directly – there’s a dialogue between brittleness, robustness and an autumnal lyricism. In the opening sequence of the title track, his lines and sounds have such fragility that it’s like hearing crystal shatter in very slow motion.

Manojlovic, Farrar, Pike and Thomas. Photos: Mclean Stephenson.Then there’s Thomas’s double bass: a mighty sound, such as the earth might make could it talk. Many bassists who are adept at their instrument don’t necessarily think like bass players. Thomas creates monolithic blocks of sound that are foundations for music that soars or sprawls above them, yet also offers sinuousness and eeriness, with his own array of surprising textures and lines thickening the percussive weave during the long-form, multifaceted Already Not Yet. Pike, meanwhile, long an innovator on the drums, creates whole palettes of shifting colours and breaking waves of energy, density, texture and rhythm, with the other three also contributing percussion, notably on Already Not Yet.

The album contains three spontaneous compositions, and I know no more sophisticated activity of which humans are capable than freely improvising at this level. Idiomatically, the music can be heard as free jazz of the sort that’s been around for 65 years, but when played on this plane it transcends definitions, and seems like you’ve opened a window, and Nature has poured these sounds into your ears, triggering responses from imagination, gut and heart. I wish I lived in the house with that window.
John Shand SMH   26th Sept 2025