Inclusion Principle

Of the many (many!!) incredible bands fronted by or featuring multi-instrumentalist Martin Archer is a longstanding duo with multi-instrumentalist Hervé Perez, Inclusion Principle. Synthesizers, saxophones, clarinets, laptops, samples, field recordings, drum machines, shakuhachi, and processing, Archer and Perez have been playing some of the most brilliant, consistently exciting electro-acoustic music of the last twenty years. Like Mezzacappa and Hubbard, they also took the opportunity of a milestone to do something a little different than their usual run of releasing a new album every couple of years. For 2025, there were four unique Inclusion Principle EPs, released throughout the year: the call of a crumbling world, clarino oscura, quantised entanglement, and needle at the bottom of the sea.

Look, I’m just going to come out and say go get them all. Consider each one like a quarterly report from your favorite independent business that you want to keep afloat. But if you’re new to their particular approach (some scored winds with improvised electronics, improvised winds over loops and samples), then maybe start inside out, clarino oscura presents Archer and Perez in a kind of usual m.o. approach, a single, extended performance, where quantised entanglement front loads opener “fire dance” with programmed beats, soaking the processed winds in late-night neon glows and angular noir rhythmic pulses. – Lee Rice Epstein https://leericeepstein.substack.com/p/what-do-we-want-more?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share

Martin Archer and Hervé Perez have spent this year celebrating their twenty years together making music under the moniker Inclusion Principle by releasing a series of EPs (they refer to to them as EPs but if I remember right, they’re all long enough to identify as albums). They describe them collectively as being a prelude to a CD they plan to bring out next year. needle at the bottom of the sea is the fourth and last.

The title intrigued me. On investigation, I discovered it’s a phrase richly layered with meaning. ‘Needle at Sea Bottom’ (Hǎidǐ zhēn, 海底针) is a Tai Chi posture. It refers, too, to the legend of the Monkey King, who takes an iron pillar from the underwater palace of the Dragon King. It had originally been used to measure the depths of the rivers and seas and could shrink to the size of a needle. It crops up, too, in a Bengali folk-tale in which a Sufi saint helps Badé Khān Gāji, in a final test of the latter’s spiritual status, to find a needle on the sea-bed.

There are three tracks here, all named after Tai Chi postures, but track separations are optional – you can listen with or without track breaks. I found myself preferring the unbroken version, saving the separated tracks for when I might want to listen to a particular section. Having had a listen to it all, I turned to the album notes to find Hervé Perez taking the very words I was about to say about it out of my mouth, or, at least the gist of them; he and Archer have made an art-form out of combining two superficially different ways of making music: their improvised electronic ruminations proceed according to their own intuitive logic, whereas their sax duets are thought out far more conventionally, as they put it, ‘using clear melody and harmony’. The result is it’s hard not to imagine them playing their saxes is some exotic forest, alien landscape or – thinking of the title here – at the bottom of some tropical sea.

The music begins with a faint, disconcerting electronic sound which is gradually absorbed into a texture which includes a deep tritone and – as befits the title – what sound like processed sea-sounds. Other sounds join in the mix. When the saxes finally come in, the effect is monumental. In the album-notes, Perez describes how ‘the electronic material was improvised in one session’ and ‘subsequently we added wind instruments and further production to the mix.’ I’m not sure what the ‘further production’ entails, but they brilliantly, in my view, create layers of sounds and spin-off musical lines that mediate between the electronics and the saxes. I don’t know how they’d put it, but that’s how I hear it. I love the creative use they make, too, of the stereo space.

Three tracks in, the saxes become less monumental and more elegiac. What was an intermittent drum beat, you suddenly realise, has become a busy, but unobtrusive bass line. There are high, sustained chords, then birdsong (is it real, or electronically generated? With IP, I’m never sure). A sax tries to imitate the birdsong, although it can never succeed, never capture the lightness. Saxes are replaced by shakuhachi, a gentler sound that can more easily coexist with the birds. The music moves into a state of stasis which, paradoxically, never seems to stand still. As it all comes to an end, we hear the sea.

Birdsong, sea-sounds, shakuhachis, drone-like chords – it could all be so predictable, but in the hands of Inclusion Principle it’s anything but. Think less a mass-produced Hawaiian shirt and more a painting by Henri Rousseau. (It’s not the first time IP have put me in mind of that artist – and, this time, there’s even a tiger in one of the track-titles!) Perez and Archer pay minute attention to the way they put sounds together and do so in a way that is always original and arresting. As with the other EPs they’ve issued this year, they’ve created a rich, immersive sound-world. When you hear the waves lapping on the beach at the end, you find yourself thinking, do I really have to come out, already? htt– Dominic Rivron, INTERNATIONAL TIMES https://internationaltimes.it/immerse-yourself-wash-out-your-ears/ 

We covered some earlier Inclusion Principle EPs in these pages — Needle at the Bottom of the Sea is the duo’s fourth EP of 2025, following The Call of a Crumbling World, Clarino Oscura, and Quantised Entanglement. They all form a prelude to the group’s planned full length CD release sometime in 2026. And of course Needle is unlike any of those EPs that preceded it, with different methodology, different instrumentation, and a very different result. This time out, Hervé Perez is credited with field recordings, electronics, beats, processing, shakuhachi, and alto and soprano saxes, while Martin Archer plays modular synthesizer, organ, iPad, bass recorder, alto, tenor and baritone saxes. The program consists of three lengthy improvised tracks coming in at around 37 minutes total. There’s plenty going on here, and really only the first couple minutes of opener “Cloud Hands” might be considered ‘quiet,’ with curious sounding field recordings and electronics holding the listener’s attention until some low-voltage rumbling begins to fill the air inside your headphones; by the time the piece reaches its near ten-minute conclusion, most of the instruments have introduced themselves, particularly the modular synth and electronics that undergird the remaining soundfield. “White Crane Spreads Its Wings” is essentially a continuation of the opener with multiple woodwind melodies aflight, not a bunch of honking and squonking, but genuinely beautiful melodies criss-crossing paths — for a while at least, until the latter half of the piece begins to reveal itself, a dark percussive cadence and electronics open the way for another round of saxophone melodies, perhaps a little harsher this time. The concluding piece, “Step Back Ride Tiger,” is the longest at well over fifteen minutes, though cut from a similar cloth as the others: Dueling saxes improvising, some low-end electronic thumping and curious found sounds all around. If one were thinking that Needle and the three previous EPs would be released on the upcoming full length CD, or in physical media form, they won’t — the upcoming CD release will be all new material to celebrate the band’s 20th anniversary. These EPs will remain as they are — download-only, but definitely worthy of your full attention. – Peter Thelen, EXPOSÉ http://expose.org/index.php/articles/display/inclusion-principle-needle-at-the-bottom-of-the-sea-3.htm