Pat Thomas: Sufi Women

Virtuoso pianist Pat Thomas released one of the finest (and most frustrating) solo performances of this decade with 2024's The Solar Model of Ibn Al-Shatir (Otoroku), and follows with a no-less important, intimate coda in Sufi Women. "Dedicated," as Thomas proclaims, "to the remarkable contribution of Sufi women in the spiritual science...known as Sufism (Islamic mysticism) in the west," the record is fittingly a strange, multidimensional collection of ecosystems, torn from the physical jumbling of the keys to the metaphysical realm of electronic jolts and croons.

It is important to examine Sufi Women in conjunction with Solar Model, even as the two are notably different in approach. The former is almost entirely formed through electronic inputs, and the latter analog. As much as AAJ does not claim any authority over medieval astronomical history, Solar Model's subject, Islamic astronomer Ibn Al-Shatir, is crucial to the construction of the performance itself. The mathematician is known today for his revolutionary model of stellar bodies, predating and influencing the famous Copernican model by more than a century. At the crux of Al-Shatir's method—and therefore Thomas'—is destabilization of existing units of measurement. For the astronomer, Ptolemaic laws of constant planetary motion are cast aside. For Thomas, melody and tonality. Each piece follows only the laws of its own movement, both instinctive and deliberately theorized, toward a defined though inconclusive endpoint. Thomas acts as a sort of astrolabe, charting the designs of his own orbit with the same wondrous fervor as we do the heavenly bodies.'

Sufi Women switches subject and tools: celestial for mystical, classical for electronic. The pieces sonically varied, a humdrum of metallic clanking and droning across industrial and earthen landscapes. Contrary to his thesis, Thomas' playing invokes less a dedication than an eerie conjuring. Samples of rough-trod pizzicato are run through numerous distortions and layered on top of each other. High-pitched squeals dance around rumblings of cantankerous earth, as if anticipating the emergence of some subterranean entity. In one fascinating section, a mysterious viola murmurs unaccompanied for half-a-minute, before exploding with a sudden panoply of boisterous chirps and squawks.

Much of Sufi Women describes something just barely hidden. Sounds are airy and sparse, even at their most abrasive. Thomas' cascading swoons could just as easily be a siren's call or a particularly strong breeze, but instead suggest both simultaneously, an intrinsic supernatural shrouded in the natural, a people below the surface of notoriety but no less abundantly powerful. His musical computations are only as beautiful as they are violent. Thomas may mimic the natural, but he never lapses into ambient.

If Solar Model translates a scientific and religious philosophy into musical terms, Sufi Women suggests no translation is needed. The two are one in the same: the work and the music, the life and the performance, are written in identical script. What makes Thomas such a beguiling performer is his willingness to accept such a transformation and the risks that come with it, gladly and without hesitation, not even the stars are out of his reach.

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