“The process is the project” : Egyptian Cotton Arkestra stays rooted in Time and Place

“We’re not topping the charts anytime soon,” says Markus Lake, an inflection of defiant pride in his voice. Egyptian Cotton Arkestra (ECA) are making an active choice to  prioritize creative freedom over career ambition, and they wouldn’t have it any other way. “It’s kind of liberating,” Lucas Huang elaborates: “We’ll just do whatever we want. It’s great.”

ECA have just released Time & Place, their debut album, an exuberant burst of experimental free jazz many years in the making. The four players comprising the Montreal-based ensemble – Lake on bass and Huang on drums, with saxophonist James Goddard and violinist Ari Swan – have deep roots in the city’s DIY and experimental improv communities. They carry their lucid sense of connection to lineage and tradition alongside firm commitments to self-awareness, presence, and spontaneity.

Locally, the group cites Montreal’s long-running Mardi Spaghetti free jazz series and the Kalmunity Vibe Collective as important precedents, as well as the fertile  overlap of punk and improvised music communities, which generates what Swan calls an “appreciation of chaotic sound” in the city. “It’s almost more of a political affinity, more than an aesthetic affinity,” says Goddard. “There is this sort of flow between those two communities, because both communities have a sense of openness, and that’s definitely super prevalent in Montreal in ways that it’s not necessarily so evident in other places.”

Further afield, ECA are also quick to emphasize identification with the communitarian ethos of free jazz versus the often cloistered and elitist implications of “free improvisation.” As such, luminaries like Sun Ra, Yusef Lateef, Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and St. Louis’ Black Artists Group loom large as influences. ECA are also as likely to draw inspiration from the social programs of the Black Panther Party or Black Power legend Kwame Ture’s insistence that “The struggle is never an event, it’s a process: a continual, eternal process.”

Indeed, the band’s process has not been without struggle, as years of working within Montreal’s creative milieux has also meant contending with realities of embedded structural racism and sexism. The members of ECA all describe instances of gatekeeping and unspoken exclusion in a scene where most positions of power and influence are occupied by white men. Though Lake explains that these days they feel well ensconced in community infrastructures that militate against those currents, he emphasizes the huge amount of labour it has taken to actively build these networks. The constitution of ECA itself is one aspect of this countermovement: all four members are people of colour, an intentional choice when Goddard initially called the group together in 2017. “We all exist in this world not as white people,” says Swan, “and there’s a freedom in that, a lack of tokenism.”

Parallel to such resolute intentionality, ECA remain dedicated to immediacy and contingency, to fearless creative expression, to playfulness as well as fury, all of which animate their thrilling live performances and guide their politics as a band. “Everything we ever do is just about the time and the place that it happens,” says Goddard. “It’s a lot of ‘what happens if we’re here, in the now?’” 

This twinned spirit of freedom and embeddedness in community is something the members of ECA clearly hold dear, despite their sometimes haphazard approach to making music. Take the closing moments of Time & Place, when a chaotic squall of noise gives way to the charming bark of engineer Ky Brooks’ dog Pan, captured during the recording session in late 2023. “The thing that we’re doing,” Huang observes, “it’s something that when we play together only exists there. I love that it’s something that can’t scale, it can’t blow up, by nature it has to be very intimate.”

It’s a privilege to be invited into their world.