Most fans of Colin Stetson have experienced a similar watershed moment. First, they find out about Stetson—maybe through his film scores, his profile within the experimental jazz community, or his association with indie rock fixtures like Arcade Fire. They become hooked by the entrancing layers of vamping saxophone, skeletal percussion, and wordless vocals that sound uncannily alien in a way that they can’t quite put their finger on. Then it will hit them: He’s making all of that sound with one instrument.
After picking their jaws off the floor—and perhaps watching a few YouTube videos to confirm this is true (it is)—they’ll return to the music with a new interest. They’ll read about Stetson’s mastery of circular breathing, which allows him to hold a single sax note indefinitely. They’ll learn how he tapes mics to his throat and instrument so that he can sing while he plays and can capture his valve changes as drum-like clicks and taps. They’ll realize they’ve discovered an artist operating at an entirely different level of craftsmanship.
Stetson has restricted himself to this one-instrument approach throughout his roughly two-decade solo career, not as a way to awe his audience, but as a way to push his art forward. “If there are parameters, then you’re setting yourself up for a little bit of a MacGyver,” he points out. “By necessity, it creates an environment for innovation.” As a result, he’s upheld strict personal rules on his recorded releases: No overdubs, no effects, nothing artificial brought into the mix. Any sounds added to a track had to be produced by himself in the moment, full stop.
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Knowing these constraints makes the otherworldly nature of Stetson’s style all the more remarkable. Saxophone melodies are often sculpted into Gaudian spirals and allowed to soar along the edges of analog reality. Percussive rhythms, reflecting their origin, can sound almost subliminal, as though propelling the track from behind the veil of a half-forgotten dream. The goal (and result) is a sound that’s immersive and powerfully affecting. “For me, the purpose of making music, the purpose of listening to music, is to move and to be moved,” Stetson says.
In his pursuit of art that’s emotionally and spiritually impactful, Stetson draws influence from various forms of ritual music. “This was the music that countless people over time chose to use in real moments of human extremis,” he explains. “These are the things that accompany our most important moments in our lives as individuals, and culturally as groups.” Taking this cue, it’s not a stretch to see Stetson’s own compositions as a form of modern-day ritual music, his mesmerizing instrumental loops a contemporary counterpart to the ceremonial repetition used in many ancient religious praxes.
This connection comes out in Stetson’s records and film soundtracks, which are often characterized by a gravity that borders on the liturgical. It could be considered his music’s fundamental organizing principle, if experimentation and the thrill of artistic discovery weren’t already so clearly occupying that position. “I love feeling that feeling [of] being on a footing which is unsure,” Stetson says. “Identifying some sort of uncharted space, and then gradually becoming able to navigate it.”
It’s anyone’s guess where Stetson will navigate to next, but the list below gives some idea of where his musical explorations have taken him in the past.
The love it took to leave you
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The muscular intensity that cuts across Stetson’s latest album is a stylistic sequel to his 2017 record All This I Do For The Glory. Stetson had intended to put The love it took to leave you out sooner, but a busy roster of other projects pushed back his timeline—perhaps for the better. “There are a lot of things that I was able to access now, this past year, that I wouldn’t have in 2018,” Stetson says. This statement is literally true for many of Stetson’s compositions, which incorporate a number of endurance-based playing techniques that Stetson couldn’t have physically performed without taking time to train his body.
New History Warfare Vol. 1
The New History Warfare series contains some of the earliest recorded examples of Stetson’s distinctive approach to the saxophone, which he developed as a music student at the University of Michigan. Stetson points to the opening track of the trilogy’s first volume as a prototype for the style that would evolve into albums like The love it took to leave you. “That seed was one of the first things that I started playing when I first started conceiving of this music” he explains. Simultaneously meditative and confrontational, the song and the album as a whole indeed sets the tone for the forward-looking career that would follow.
Ex Eye
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Although he trained as a jazz artist, Stetson’s music has an element of aggression that reflects his long-held love of other genres, particularly metal. “Metal, in many of its various forms, is something that I’ve been listening to since I was a kid,” Stetson says. “It’s a part of my musical DNA.” Stetson engages with this form directly in Ex Eye, a post-metal band he headed with bandmates Greg Fox, Shahzad Ismaily, and Toby Summerfield, whose patiently anthemic debut encapsulates and expands on the ideas Stetson explores in his solo work. “It’s very much the kind of thing that the four of us, put together, would come up with,” he notes.
When we were that what wept for the sea
Stetson’s evocatively-named 2023 album is somewhat exceptional among his later solo work. Although he sticks to his one-instrument format, Stetson also welcomes features from similarly-minded musicians, including experimental small pipes artist Brìghde Chaimbeul. Thematically, it’s also rooted in a very specific emotional space. “When we were that what wept for the sea is very much a reaction to my father passing away in 2021,” says Stetson. “I wanted to stay in that space and write my own story for that period of time.” This story seems visceral on the record’s title track, with Stetson’s swirling galaxies of notes softening into a sonic palette that feels both mournful and profound.
La Peur (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Narrative plays an important function in Stetson’s music, a quality that fed naturally into his work on film scores. Although his soundtracks for several notable films (e.g. Hereditary, The Menu) aren’t available on Bandcamp, his score for the French film Le Peur provides a strong example of the types of worlds Stetson can build when he fleshes out his saxophone parts with other woodwind and string sections. Translating to “The Fear,” the film follows a young French soldier in World War I, a fitting canvas for Stetson’s fluency with somber, militaristic soundscapes.
Tiny Beast
By Stetson’s standards, his work with Transmission Trio is some of the most conventional jazz music the saxophonist has ever released. The group, which Stetson joined in college, was important to him for many reasons, not least of which because it provided a chance for him to jam and gig with some of his best friends. “It represented a kind of freedom and coming of age,” Stetson says of the band. “It’s a freeing space that cultivates that curiosity and wonder and wander that was really quite special to my life overall, and definitely very important to my arc as a player.”
