In an attempt to create cerebral scenes as written accompaniment to an advanced musical dialect, we journalists often use borderline silly analogical descriptions to seduce potential audiences into listening to whatever it is we just toiled with for a month. The almost ambiguous emotions and heightened passion I've experienced during my assignment at Squid's Ear have possessed me (literally, I believe) to relate "...this music exudes the grace and violence of a NASA enterprise: at times lingering in static poses on the dark side of the moon, other moments crashing face-first into the sun" (Ferguson / van Heumen's Whistle Pig Saloon) and "As the tide recedes, the quartet slinks into a cabalistic witch's brew" (Cirotteau, Lacasse, Massicotte and Normand's Face a la derive).
Is it ironic or useful (or funny, or clever, or moot) that John Butcher (here on both tenor and soprano sax) and post-pianist Claudia Ulla Binder would name an album Under the Roof and fill it with titles of items you find around a house: "Cantilever", "Leak", "Housemice", "Kestrel" and "Skylight", all things that produce sounds each musician has at some point probably been — and will inevitably be — compared to. Such as:
The duo moves in the fashion of a cantilever, Binder offering a spacious, load-bearing pointillism on one end to balance Butcher's persistent structural stress of flutter tongue and scalar decent to lower registers.
Binder's agitated single-note rapid-fire enters as drips from a leaking rain gutter while Butcher huffs and feverishly taps his instrument as if patching a pipe, both eventually sinking into the swirling pool on the floor.
Butcher's gentle yet high-pitched active squeals recall a rodent in the wall whose utterances provide sonar for his next purchase.
Binder's staccato clusters serve as an obvious, then elusive target for Butcher's dive-bombing attacks, the scene playing out like a kestrel that didn't count on a fight from his prey while scrambling for dinner.
A gentle humming drone from each party oozes through space, rising past echoes and ghosts in an attic only to halt, swirl and probe at a cobweb-covered, faintly lit skylight."
(And "Troves", which communicates the idea of Binder's mysterious, dusty drawers full of soundboard preparations.)
Regardless of intent, Butcher and Binder's rubrics reinforce visual portraits of their playful claustrophobia. The duo's imagination and capacity to spin interest from mundanity, to animate wood, wire and plastic, is...we need someone to author a phrase that encapsulates "amazing" and "uncanny" and "natural" and "virtuosic" and "as intriguing as the walking, multiplying brooms in The Sorcerer's Apprentice" and "puts aside Butcher's intimidating history to focus on this present union" in its meaning. For now, just use Under the Roof.
Comments and Feedback:
| 
