Matthew Wright’s Cracked Glaze is released on False Walls in May 2026. Here are Matthew’s sleeve notes from the CD booklet.
On Cracked Glaze
Matt Wright
In ceramics, a cracked glaze can occur during the firing process, when intense heat creates fractures, resulting in a tension between a smooth form and a tarnished surface. With Cracked Glaze I’m interested in how the elements of musical notation, improvisation and technology collide and ‘crack’ each other to produce catalytic results.
Commissioned by Ensemble Klang for their Musical Utopias festival in 2024, the project brings together a part-reading, part-improvising 12-piece group of Ensemble Klang, Spheric Totemic and Sofia Jernberg. This piece came out of a long period of planning in the autumn of 2023, an afternoon of rehearsal on the day of the premiere in January 2024, followed by a long period of mixing and post-production between autumn 2024 and autumn 2025. In essence what you hear on this release is the live recording from the premiere, mixed to exaggerate the sound field and bring out individual musical lines that were buried in the texture during the live performance. I think of this post-production process as like a repeat firing in ceramics: the material has undergone another layer of glazing, of cracking, of clarifying.
In terms of the notated material, the whole piece is built around a ‘spine’ of one long, descending scale (each note lasting five seconds and played on the guitar) that takes nineteen minutes to unfurl. This then repeats with some variations before finally settling on a four-note figure in the bass. The figure then evaporates into a coda of bass harmonics and glissandi in the brass. The whole process takes around forty-six minutes and I think of this as like a time-stretched version of a Tom Johnson Rational Melody. It becomes almost inevitable across the span of the piece and functions like a clean, ‘objective’ form in ceramics.
There are other layers of the notation that provide supporting roles: compressed fragments of the descending scale that appear as tiny melodies in the keyboards and vibraphone; hyper-compressed tremolos on keyboards; repeating cells and glissandi in the brass; and the concert bass drum sounding at key points in the structure. All of these elements are connected to exact points on a timeline and therefore would be more or less the same every time the piece is played. This could, in simplistic terms, be perceived as the ‘glaze’ in the title.
Superimposed against this notated ‘glaze’ are time-brackets (essentially start and stop times) for improvisors. The order of the improvisations is fixed with specific timings (first a duo between Sofia and Mandhira de Saram; then a duo between Stephen Davis and Joey Marijs, joined by Neil Charles; a solo from Alexander Hawkins, and then another duo from Sofia and Mandhira that becomes connected to a final solo from Neil) and these sections generally overlap/crossfade. Whilst these parameters are fixed, the musical material for the improvisors is generally not specified apart from the occasional suggestion, such as asking for Neil to play with bass harmonics at the end of the piece. These genius improvisors bring to the open instructions decades of collective intuitive experience, their musical languages cracking the glaze of my notation and throwing the music into a different direction, nodding to influences beyond notated music and way beyond Europe.
In the performance I took inputs of all of the improvisors, the saxophones and the trombone into my turntable/laptop setup, so that I could sample, process and sculpt the live sound design from the stage. In the final post-production ‘firing’ I was able to expand the sound field through reverbs, delays and panning, making the spaces in the music deliberately wider and deeper. Long sustained tones (made from extreme software time-stretching of the descending scale) were evident in the premiere recording, but in post I was able to give them more of a ‘sweeping/crossfading’ role, acting almost like changing light around the cracked glaze.
In some cases I have added samples (such as the drum kit ‘trio’ around 13.40) that didn’t exist in the original performance. There are even a few brief, surreal moments where I deliberately superimpose a soloist’s improvisation from the premiere with their solo from the afternoon rehearsal (something for the real close listeners!). For me this is the temporal equivalent of a spatial relationship: ‘present’ and ‘past’ recordings being heard simultaneously like the ability to see both the outside and inside of a ceramic bowl at the same time. This is not a fully-formed thought perhaps, but I certainly think visually/spatially when I am mixing: ‘feeling’ recordings as three-dimensional objects with angles, distances and apertures.
The title is a reference to the barst glazuur (cracked glaze) collection in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag that I have been lucky enough to visit many times, especially whilst I was a guest teacher at The Royal Conservatory in The Hague during the spring and summer of 2023. My huge thanks to CJ Mitchell of False Walls, Sofia Jernberg, my fellow musicians in Spheric Totemic (Alexander Hawkins, Neil Charles, Stephen Davis, Mandhira de Saram) and the incredible Ensemble Klang, who have supported my music for nearly two decades. My thoughts are with the family of Erik-Jan de With, who passed away suddenly in February 2025. He was an incredible light.
