Trevor Dunn’s Trio Convulsant Releases First Album in 18 Years

Trevor Dunn's Trio Convulsant: SéancesTrevor Dunn has revived his Trio Convulsant for the first time in 18 years for the album Séances. The album sees the reunion of the group with guitarist Mary Halvorson and drummer Ches Smith while adding to the genre-bending sounds with Folie à Quatre, a string and winds quartet. Together they create a sound like Dunn had originally conceived for the group, which he said was to “make jazz heavier and make heavy music more harmonically rich.”

Dunn is a madman on the upright, at times driving the group into a frenzy with relentless flurries of notes or dissonant noises. That plays into part of the album’s theme of the Convusionnaires of Saint-Médard, which was an 18th-century French Christian sect known for ecstatic displays at supposed miracles.

“The name of the band comes from a Surrealist concept,” he explains, “so when I read about the Convulsionnaires it felt like returning back the origins of that. Whether you believe these miracles happened or not, the idea of mass hysteria and group belief is fascinating to me. So this one weird, obscure concept became a kind of unifying principle for the album. I don’t know how much my research informed the actual music beyond the subliminal, but interesting accidents happen sometimes, and I like to grab onto those accidents.”

Get a feel for the album with the opener, “Secours Meutriers”:

Séances is available now on CD and as a digital download (iTunes and Amazon MP3).

Séances Track List:

  1. Secours Meutriers
  2. Saint-Médard
  3. Restore All Things
  4. 1733
  5. The Asylum’s Guilt
  6. Eschatology
  7. Thaumaturge

Get daily bass updates.

Get the latest news, videos, lessons, and more in your inbox every morning.

Share your thoughts