Despite his long tenure in the UK creative music scene, British improvising pianist Pat Thomas has only just begun to gain widespread recognition as a singular talent. Over the last thirty years, Thomas has collaborated with a who’s who of musicians – Derek Bailey, Lol Coxhill, Eugene Chadbourne, Steve Beresford, Keith Tippett, Phil Minton, Charles Hayward, Evan Parker, Wadada Leo Smith… The list goes on across 65-plus recordings.
His style varies quite a bit, from open-ended improv to classically oriented passages to sound art. The closest comparison that comes to mind is Matthew Shipp, but Thomas’s style is only similar when viewed from a high level.
Perhaps attention has been turned to Thomas recently due to a late-career burst of activity. Thanks to 577 Records and other labels, Thomas has appeared on 13 releases in the last 18 months.
Here, we focus on some of his output over this period.
Dominic Lash and Pat Thomas – New Oxford Brevity (2022; Spoonhunt)
This appears to be an all-out extemporaneous duo from Lash on electric guitar and Thomas on piano. In contrast to Lash’s unstructured approach, Thomas drifts between a similar style and more strict arrangements. Thus, Thomas provides a grounding with complex runs and jagged accompaniment to Lash’s barely-controlled meandering. A highlight is the last few minutes of A Flower is a Source of Joy, in which Thomas’s percussiveness and odd chording dovetail nicely with note bending from Lash. This twosome put together a notably dense and active set that sounds bigger than just their pair of instruments.
Dave Tucker, Pat Thomas, Thurston Moore, Mark Sanders – Educated Guess Vol. 2 (2022; 577 Records)
The previous Educated Guess Vol. 1 from this quartet was a favorite of 2021. This follow-up was recorded on the same night but is only EP length, at just over 26 minutes. Initially, Thomas plays almost straight, with short motifs and trills accompanied by disjointed textural scraping and clanging from the other three. In fact, Thomas on piano and Sanders on drums are at least identifiable. The dual guitar texturalisms of Tucker and Moore are disjointed, angular, and seemingly indiscriminate. Rather than playing their instruments in any conventional sense, they cooperate with one another to generate the strangest noises they can. Bent notes, harmonics, and bursts of distortion become the norm and Sanders provides an angular base for their loosely-coupled explorations. After an initial stint in the foreground, Thomas plays effect-laden keys in the background for most of the first track. He is much more active on the shorter second track, adding dense classical structures to the untethered contributions of his bandmates.
Pat Thomas – Burdah Variations (2023; scatterArchive)
Here we have a different animal. More GRM-styled abstractions in line with Thomas’s recent WAZIFAH Vol. 1 release. He uses samples of actual instruments but then manipulates, them often to beyond the point of recognition. The album opens with jarring harsh noise walls. On subsequent tracks, semi-conventional instrumentation is combined with staccato electroacoustics and shimmering constructs. In particular, twisted woodwinds tempered by electronics of an unusual character. While an outlier in comparison to the recordings discussed above, Burdah Variations serves to experiment with the very fabric of music. Thomas questions the nature of our expectations with pure auditory originality.
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