Dominic Valvona (Monolith Cocktail) on Eyre by light.box (Alex Bonney / Pierre Alexandre Tremblay) + Tom Challenger
We last heard of Pierre Alexandre Tremblay (one half of the trick noise manipulator and glitchy modulators light.box duo alongside trumpeter and electronics apparatus diviner Alex Bonney), or rather his transformative hardware effects, on last year’s Shadow Figures performance collaboration with Spaces Unfolding. Also released on the revitalized Bead Records label, that avant-garde serialism of challenging site-specific experiments coincided with the imprint’s 50th anniversary.
Fast forward just a few months later and Tremblay is back to improvise new sonic, tonal and this time tuneful expressions and cries with both his light.box foil Bonney and the noted, and very much in demand, tenor saxophonist, composer, band leader, side man, educator and researcher Tom Challenger.
Intersecting at this time and juncture, the wealth of experience and impressive CVs of all three participants’ reads like a who’s who of contemporary and extemporised jazz in the UK and beyond. Take Bonney for instance, He’s popped up on the Monolith Cocktail for his role in Pando Pando, Leverton Fox and Scarla O’ Horror, but also collaborates with Will Glaser. Challenger meanwhile has a never-ending stream of credits and projects, both one-offs and longer lasting partnerships: one of his most notable being with Kit Downes. Tremblay, meanwhile, has just as enviable a career as his two foils; a polymath electroacoustic musician who plays bass, guitar, and transmogrifies electronic sounds and operations via a laptop, he’s been on the fringes and at the forefront of pushing jazz and experimental electronics via successive projects and groupings.
Using both the reference language of a Medieval English travelling court and bonded atoms, the trio invoke manifestations of shadow play, foreboding soundtracks, the kosmische and a removed version of the great tenor saxophonist and trumpet progenitors of atonal and freeform jazz.
And yet for all of that, the actual brass is often melodic when seeping, traversing or drifting across a bed of Affenstunde era Popol Vuh and Kluster alien generations, oscillations, zaps and charged electricity. There’s an essence of Ornette Coleman, of Jonah Parzen-Johnson, of Andy Haas, of Ariel Kalma and Archie Shepp crossing nodes, or shadowing the brassy heralds of Sketches Miles and Don Cherry; both sounding out across the cosmic and more mysterious machine hums, ziplines, vibrations and dark atmospheres – like the overhead prowls of alien zeppelins or an icebreaker carving through a supernatural Artic. There are intense passages of duck-billed honks, whines, the bristled and harassed of course, but nothing quite like Last Exit.
In other sections Killing Joke and Jah Wobble loose rubbery post-punk trebly bass notes pulsate and reverberate as the frictions, frequencies, signals, waveforms, slithers, crackles of an electronic soundboard – part Irmin Schmidt, part Tangerine Dream – undulate or sweep and expand like chemistry and atoms.
If I was to summarise, or offer a reference, think Taj Mahal Travellers get into it with Oren Ambarchi, Sly and the Family Drone, Schneider Kacirek and the Black Unity Trio. A total experience that merges elements of jazz, post-punk, kosmische music, techno and avant-garde into an unnerving but also imaginative soundtrack-like performance of playful shadowy curiosity and gravitas. For all three musicians, another successful merger and pooling together of improvisational and explorative skills.
Eyal Hareuveni (Salt Peanuts) on Eyre by light.box (Alex Bonney / Pierre Alexandre Tremblay) + Tom Challenger
light.box is the British experimental duo of trumpeter-electronics player-recording engineer-producer Alex Bonney and Canada-born bassist-electronics player-composer-educator Pierre Alexandre Tremblay. Eyre is the fourth album of the duo, now augmented with British tenor sax player Tom Challenger (Bonney recorded and mixed albums of Challenger with Kit Downes, Alexander Hawkins and Mark Sanders. Challenger recorded a duo album with Trembly, Twill, Loop, 2022), recorded at City University in London in February 2024. It was mixed by Tremblay, and mastered by Bonney and Tremblay. Bonney took the cover photo.
Eyre captures the first-ever performance of this free improvising trio as it investigates a spectrum of timbres and textures in all its exploratory rawness. This ad-hoc trio relies on the deep rapport that developed over years of playing together in various other projects.
The labrum begins with «Lateral Sway», an intense and restless, electroacoustic collision of sounds, textures and improvisation tactics, with Challenger attempting to discipline the stormy, reverbrating electronics of light.box into a coherent narrative. The four-part suite «Chain Chimes» is introduced by Bonney’s gentle, melodic theme, soon expanded and intensified into a playful free jazz form by Challenger, and then it is processed and mutated by light.box’ subtle electronics. Later on, it morphs into a mysterious, alien ambient drone, but with delicate timbral and microtonal explorations, and only Challnger’s processed breaths floating over the dense soundscape, and eventually it gravitates into post-techno, post-free jazz distorted explosion but with distant, acoustic, lyrical tones of Bonney’s trumpet and Challenger’s sax. The last piece «Covalent» concludes this exploratory journey by returning full circle to the layered, electroacoustic collision of sounds of the opening piece.
Phil Freeman (The Wire) on Eyre by light.box (Alex Bonney / Pierre Alexandre Tremblay) + Tom Challenger
Trumpeter Alex Bonney and bass guitarist PAT, both of whom double on electronics, are UK unit light.box; tenor saxophonist Tom Challenger (what a name to live up to!) is their guest on this, their fourth album. The bulk of it is made up of the half-hour suite “Chain Chimes”, which is divided into three tracks and an interlude and includes overdubbed horn chorales, noise-dub bass, throbbing power electronics à la Prurient, and less immediately classifiable sounds. It never reaches Borbetomagus-like heights of free squall, opting instead to ooze like early Tangerine Dream had they gone spiritual jazz. At its best, it sounds like Bill Dixon and Evan Parker teaming up with Excepter to perform some kind of dark funeral rite.
Tony Dudley Evans (UK Jazz News) on Eyre by light.box (Alex Bonney / Pierre Alexandre Tremblay) + Tom Challenger
light.box is the duo of Alex Bonney and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, both on electronics, but with Bonney doubling on trumpet and Tremblay doubling on bass guitar. They have made four records, the first just as a duo, the others in partnership with one other musician, Sam Pluta, another electronics performer on one, British-based Norwegian drummer Emil Karlsen on another, and Tom Challenger on this most recent album.
The collaboration with Tom Challenger creates music with many variations and full of unique sounds and textures. The collaboration takes different forms; at times the electronics lays down a rich backing for Challenger to develop his own lines over, at others the approach is much more interactive with Challenger integrating short phrases with similarly short phrases from the electronics. Bonney also moves between electronics and his trumpet, swapping phrases on the trumpet with Challenger’s saxophone in the classic free jazz style, but also blending in with the electronics to create a rich integrated sound.
The opening track, “Lateral Sway”, begins with a booming industrial sound; this serves as a rich background over which Challenger develops abstract lines on the tenor sax.
“Chain Chimes” begins with Bonney on trumpet improvising in short interactive phrases with Challenger. The track is divided into three parts and a short interlude and after the opening duet between Bonney and Challenger it moves into various passages of electronics with snatches of distant sound from the saxophone and the trumpet at different points to create a very special sound.
The final track, “Covalent”, has, after an extensive electronic opening, a beautiful, rather melancholy solo from Challenger over atmospheric electronics; it concludes with a more forceful statement from the saxophone, still over the electronics.
The album is on Bead, a label which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year and in which Emil Karlsen is now playing a leading role.
Daniel Spicer (Jazzwise) on Eyre by light.box + Tom Challenger
light.box is the duo of trumpeter Alex Bonney and bassist Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, both of whom also add a rich electronic stew to their atmospheric improvisations. For their last album, 2023’s The Undanced Dance, they were joined by drummer Emil Karlsen. This time, tenor saxophonist Tom Challenger guests.
There’s a decidedly subdued feel to this expedition, with thick banks of electronic cloud and drizzle seeming to dampen any untoward bursts of enthusiasm. Widescreen sonic events spurt like distant coronae and judder like implacable industrial machinery, with Tremblay’s bass guitar thranging and throbbing below. Meanwhile, Challenger, for the most part, is free to wander disconsolately over the top of this chilly ambience.
When Bonney’s trumpet appears with a lonesome call, the sax joins in muted dialogue before both are subjected to real-time sampling, setting up complex echoes very much reminiscent of Terry Riley’s 1963 tape manipulation piece, ‘Music For The Gift,’ which artfully mangled a Chet Baker performance. Hats off to this current endeavour for keeping some of that avant-garde intensity alive and well in 2025.
Andrzej Nowak (Spontaneous Music Tribune) on Eyre by light.box + Tom Challenger
Jazz, or rather post-jazz saxophone bathed in a dense stream of electronics, from which incidental phrases of trumpet and bass guitar emerge. The album opens with an almost epic ending, and in between, the main content, divided into four sub-chapters, serves as a basis for a discussion on the merits of improvisation dominated by synthetic sounds.
As promised, the album opens with a stream of glitchy electronics, also built with bass feedback. In these circumstances, the saxophone comes to life, flowing with a calm, jazzy tone. Meanwhile, the opening of the four-part main phase might be the most interesting segment of the album. We hear clean trumpet phrases, followed shortly by the saxophone. A fascinating dialogue forms, which is spread across the entire spectrum of the narrative, cleverly edited with live processing and supported by phrases from the live bass. The whole thing gradually molds into a dense, rough ambient, with emotions created by the bass, which melts into the growing wave of electronics. After an interlude lasting just under a hundred seconds, reminiscent of Tibetan meditation, the narrative reaches a phase defined by both the taste of deconstructed rock and post-jazz synthetic sounds, inevitably associated with the works of Nils Peter Molvær. The main section of the album is complemented by clean, melodic saxophone phrases intriguingly correlated with bass fuzz. The album's conclusion lasts ten minutes and introduces many new elements. Electroacoustic hum and the dark glow of ambient build the background, on which the main action unfolds – a dialogue between saxophone and bass, systematically soaked in electronics. On the final stretch, there is no shortage of melody, counterpointed by the electronic screeching.