Inimitable musician, theorist and free thinker Mark Fell lifts the veil on his singular, minimalist yet omnivorous practice with almost three hours of gonzoid recordings of a week long workshop in Vienna with ensemble Studio Dan, edited and crammed with snagging surprises.

Strewn with his commentary in the margins, ‘Remarks on Process’ presents a sort of director’s cut of improvised and edited music that Mark Fell has been keenly advancing for a decade since his works with instrumentalists Sandro Mussida, Rhodri Davies and Okkyung Lee, and right up to a recent trip with Limp Fuchs for Black Truffle. Whether in the room guiding players, or pulling strings in the edits, Fell gently flips our wigs with 2hr 40mins of wickedly unpredictable music that derives a strange joy from its procedural systems… developed to explore “group behaviours and emergent musical aesthetics”

Making subtle use of mic’ing and volume envelopes to pick out aspects of the stereo field like a director and lighting designer spotting actors/players, he smudges perceptions of rehearsal and performance, art and artifice, transliteration and transmutation. Participants appear to reply to his queries and commands (or do they?) in a devilishly playful push and pull of elements that calls to mind everything from Nathan Fielder’s ‘The Rehearsal’ to Edition RZ’s pressing of conductor Hermann Scherchen urging a symphony orchestra preparing a Beethoven piece in its hybrid dramaturgy, and the ways it messes with audiences perspective, anticipations, and the psychology of listening.

With not a single detectable bit of synthesis, the in-depth excursion unfolds in wonderfully disjointed and perfectly juxtaposed non-linearities thru a week of jams, from passages of sucked and squeaked extended trumpet, to stop/start jazz deconstructions echoing turns with drummer Will Guthrie in eruptions of loud drums and acknowledgements of mistakes, thru to rhythmelodic parts where time is liquified and and sloshes in on itself in ways recalling Mark’s duo side with Rian Treanor, ‘Last Exit’. It’s a low-key masterclass in experimenting with the fundamentals and range of instrumental music, rich with the sort of perceptive insight that has emerged thru Mark’s unyielding and bewildering spectra of arranged sounds - and writing - during the past quarter century and more.