Supersense:

Music for Scent and Sound

This project includes music composed in tandem with complementary scents, intended to enhance and intensify musical output and the listener's input. The band has voices of some of the most prominent voices in creative music today; Jason Moran (piano), Stomu Takeishi (bass), Kenny Wollesen (drums, wollesonics) with scents designed by multimedia artist Sean Raspet.

“Supersense is an exploration of the emotional dialogue between sound and scent which evoke sensations that linger in the wordless space of sonic vibration and chemical reaction.” — Steph Richards

"Supersense makes for high-grade experimental avant-garde and then some" (All About Jazz ****1/2)

"unquestionably beautiful…an engaging multi-sensory tableau ****" (Downbeat)

"Steph Richards is an emerging maestro" (New York Times)

Supersense: released October 26, 2020 on Northern Spy Records NS130 Recording Engineer: David Stoller

Mixing and Mastering Engineer: Andrew Munsey

Co-produced by Steph Richards and Andrew Munsey

All rights reserved, ASCAP and Northern Spy license all rights reserved

Studio Feature with additional video footage and art from Cossa & Pieter Kaufman.

Detailed Album Description:

As one of the most exciting artists working in jazz’s avant-garde Steph Richards is no stranger to challenging listeners’ expectations, helping them hear things they might not have previously imagined with experiments that range from playing underwater to incorporating a carousel into one of her compositions. But the trumpeter, composer and bandleader is pushing in a still more unusual direction on her upcoming release SUPERSENSE (out October 23 on Northern Spy). Along with a trio of fellow all-star improvisers — Jason Moran, Stomu Takeishi and Kenny Wolleson — Richards tapped acclaimed multimedia artist Sean Raspet to create singular, abstract scents to both inform and accompany the recording.

“I was thinking about how much information you get from a live performance that you just can't get by listening to something digitally,” says Richards, alluding to how that rich experience gets literally and figuratively compressed by contemporary distribution — not just its soundwaves, but the feel, look and in the case of SUPERSENSE, smell of where it’s being performed. “What if I could create an experience where listeners felt even closer to the music by involving their other senses?”

Having worked with both pioneering experimentalists like Butch Morris, Anthony Braxton and Henry Threadgill and more pop-oriented innovators like St. Vincent and Yoko Ono, Richards has pursued abstract, visceral expression via a variety of musical modes — but scent offered a new pathway to intuitive immediacy, a way to prompt herself and her collaborators that avoided language and representation completely. So with Raspet’s help, she crafted the album’s scents and compositions simultaneously, writing his concoctions into her score: As they played, the musicians would be directed to open numbered boxes containing scents that they would then respond to with improvisation.

“They’re not necessarily beautiful,” Richards explains — one of her own favorite scents, for example, was of cricket exoskeletons. “They’re weird, complex things you can't put your finger on — some of them make you feel a little uneasy, some make you feel clean, some make you feel dirty.” Fittingly, the ensemble explores a wide range of unorthodox sounds and textures. Moran offers some piano preparations, Wolleson brought a van-full of homemade percussion to the session, and Richards altered her already dynamic sound with a range of mutes and even playing underwater. Raspet then listened to the record, and tweaked the scents to better accompany the music. His creations, presented on a scratch and sniff card, will accompany physical copies of the record so that listeners can get the full experience, taking in the smells as they hear each track.

Though Richards had hoped to present the album’s full multisensory experience via live performance, its mission — to bring some of the tactile feeling of concert-going to the at-home listener — has rarely been more relevant than during the COVID-19 pandemic, when intimate shows seem all but impossible. She hopes that by playing to more than one sense, listeners will be drawn into the music more fully. “It's really mean to live in abstract wordless space,” she concludes. “One where we’re not exactly able to define where we're traveling and what we're feeling, but where we can just be swept away by sensation.”

Liner Notes for Supersense, by Steve Smith:

—

Steve Smith

Defining precisely what music is can be a thankless task, but one thing pretty much everyone might agree upon is that it fundamentally is an auditory phenomenon. Still, our appreciation of music also taps into a wider world of senses all the time, metaphorically speaking. We perceive visual cues, registering music as bright or murky, red-hot or bluesy; painters and sculptors routinely attempt to render music in oil or steel, while musicians employ lighting effects to enhance their aural creations. We allude to our sense of taste when describing some especially pleasing concord or piquant gesture. We employ aspects of touch when perceiving music as hard or soft. Auditory phenomena can convey musical intent: we literally feel high notes deep inside our ears, while bass drops rumble and punch our guts palpably.

Olfactory input seems slight by comparison, apart from scents associated with the places where music is made, the people inhabiting those places, and the activities of those people: eating, smoking, sweating. (There also is that well-worn metaphorical marker of quality: this stinks.) But biological research indicates that sound and smell are cross-wired at a primal level in humans, suggesting elemental imperatives that modern humans have evolved beyond.

Evolution is exactly what the improvising trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Steph Richards has in mind in her newest project, SUPERSENSE, created in collaboration with Sean Raspet, an artist who works in flavor and fragrance. Raspet’s art, rooted in chemistry and philosophy, engages human perception on multiple levels. Richards, a creator whose musical practice has incorporated elements of vision and motion, sought a new physical dimension in these compositions, exploring how scent perception may transform musical output and the listening experience.

“Much like music, I believe that scent art is a performative one: scents and music must be performed to exist,” Richards wrote. “I believe that the act of smelling is the performance of perfume, the act of hearing is the performance of music. I also believe that the powerful olfactory sense can trigger improvising musicians to take their music in new and important directions, and deepen our global connection to music in the moment.”

Richards, whose past collaborators include Anthony Braxton, David Byrne, Yoko Ono, Kanye West, and Henry Threadgill, is no stranger to evolutionary notions. For SUPERSENSE, she enlisted a first-call team of similarly versatile colleagues. Occupying the piano bench is Jason Moran, a MacArthur fellow whose creative output encompasses music, visual art, video, and more. Bass guitarist Stomu Takeishi has provided supple, sinuous support to artists like Henry Threadgill, Paul Motian, and Myra Melford; drummer and percussionist Kenny Wollesen, a veteran of countless John Zorn projects, has also worked alongside Tom Waits, Sean Lennon, and Bill Frisell.

With Raspet signed on to participate, Richards incorporated scent cues into the scores she wrote for her quartet, and had the musicians answer to olfactory prompts during the recording. In live performances, she intends to have the scents diffused into the concert space, so that audiences can perceive and interpret the smells. And in this present recording, Richards has arranged to integrate Raspet’s contributions through scratch-and-sniff ink.

Richards is privy to the secret ingredients that went into the blending of each fragrance and odor involved in SUPERSENSE—but she’s not telling. As you listen, you might ask yourself: Does the title track’s subtle aroma correspond with the fitfully slinky beat and chameleonic mood swings? Does the fruity aroma of “Canopy” line up with Richards’s gnarled figurations, and her band’s tension-and-release backing? What olfactory elements conspired to provoke the rasp and gleam of “Metal Mouth”?

Richards notes that some scents were designed as inspirational prompts, and others functioned like conversational counterpoint. Resist the urge to imagine literal correspondence, she suggests, and instead let your senses be saturated by an ensemble of scent and sound. Your response is a matter of individual interpretation. But what’s certain is that Richards – like all explorers involved in evolutionary change – has conceived a provocative thesis, assembled a team of collaborators amply endowed with creativity and curiosity, and achieved results that are certain to spark contemplation and conversation.

That the music on SUPERSENSE works beautifully on its own comes as no surprise, given its participants. But here, the satisfaction perceived by the ear is matched by the novel adventure of being led around by the nose. Breathe deeply, and allow your mind to wander.