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  Kuchen / Rowe / Wright 
  s/t
  (Another Timbre) 


  
   review by Kurt Gottschalk
  2010-08-30
Kuchen / Rowe / Wright: s/t (Another Timbre)

There's precious little information accompanying this brief and lightly engaging CD, which at this point in EAI time might be just as well as trying to provide playing credits that make sense. To characterize this as a sax trio, for example, makes about as much sense as calling Keith Rowe � the best known of the three here � a guitarist. True Rowe makes use of a guitar as a sound-making station, implementing its pickups and strings to transmit waves to the sonic sphere. But the most "musical" sounds likely to be heard from his playing are the happenstance result of a radio played through its circuits. Likewise, the anxious sounds of windblown reeds and brass and the punctuations of electrical impulse have little to do with the objects Seymour Wright and Martin K�chen have at hand, are at least what expectations might arise at the sight of those objects.

Sight, however, is something we don't have at our disposal here. At it's best, the practice of nonlinear, acentric, object-driven sound-making creates an inner logic where the listening experience is accepted at face value, a story being told in a language the listener doesn't understand, but which is engaging and even somewhat comprehensible. When it works, in other words, we don't feel the need to see. But sometimes the presentation can be such a scattering of sound events that the question "what are they doing?" becomes a distraction. If this says more about the listener than the performers, so be it. The experience here is intriguing even if the effect isn't wholly satisfying.







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