Conventional music-making places a premium on instrumental stability.

The idea that an instrumentalist remains in full control of their horn at all times, their flawless technique staring even the most challenging sequence of notes square in the eye, is a cherished ideal – a guarantor of professionalism and musical quality. But this new 4CD project from the Brooklyn-based trumpeter Nate Wooley flips that assumption on its head. Questions are posed about what happens to our assumptions of music when an instrumentalist aims their arsenal of technique directly at destabilising their instrument; far from using technique to guarantee certainty, here Wooley deploys his profound knowledge of trumpet-lore to tease out sounds that are ephemeral and that might not be reproducible. Wooley has demonstrated his prodigious jazz chops with the likes of Anthony Braxton, Ken Vandermark and John Zorn, while his recordings with Evan Parker and Seymour Wright find him resonating in keen sympathy with UK free improvisers. He has also fed off the work and ideas of experimental composers like John Cage and Morton Feldman and The Complete Syllables Music wraps all these ideas into a single, unified vision. To distance himself from the muscular memory of traditional technique, Wooley devised a synthetic technique anchored around a set of facial positions very unlikely to generate stable or sustained notes. His next step involved pegging these facial positions around specific phonemes taken from the Phonetic Alphabet. The first two discs serve up the raw results of Wooley's experiments, as a broken and erratic sequence of overtone-ripe drones and slapped, cracking notes disappear into tense walls of ragged silence. Discs three and four are devoted to the extended two-part ‘For Kenneth Gaburo’, Wooley's hat-tip towards an American composer whose work carved sounds out of linguistic theory, which climaxes with trembling, peaty electronically-enabled overtones from which pure trumpet tones croon before being sucked back inside the maelstrom.