With this collaborative work internationally recognized musicians Christian Fennesz, Werner Dafeldecker, and Martin Brandlmayr demonstrate how they can grab attention while the work grows increasingly shapeless. The process begins with a series of improvisations, which each player reworks and edits into an individual piece that is featured on the second side of this two-disc set. From these works, the trio then collectively extracts fragments and, in a show of creative vitality, uses them to fashion a single thirty-five minute composition that spans the first disc.
Advanced musical democracy and cutting edge sound synthesis work in tandem and figure prominently throughout. They are particularly evident on the first CD, however, where the studio is clearly used as an instrument to push fragments of discreet but hyper-dynamic improvised abstraction into an area of immaculately engineered sonic sophistication.
The multifaceted technique that informs this piece enables a demanding excursion into compression and reverb, space and impact. A powerful sense of focus protrudes through the music as astringent and mechanical electronic sounds, dry staccato chatter on vibraphone, and sporadic guitar plucking are constantly balanced on a knife-edge, allowing an aesthetic stasis to build and briskly splinter into a Spartan simplicity and structural hiccups that filter through the space, giving the piece such movement and even vibrancy before it collapses into disintegrated desolation.
The second disc, featuring individual selections from Brandlmayr, Dafeldecker, and Fennesz is more vivacious, dense, and pointed, and yet entirely in keeping with the rough-hewn experimentalism of before. Each work shifts shades of metallic grey with a reckless, abandoned weariness. "Tau" comes close to being a headlong free jazz charge, as cymbal crashes trigger other sounds — chewy delays, occasional belches of bass, beeps and taps while the sound of "Jets" is constantly breaking up into a multicolored distortion, almost as though the microphone were horribly overloaded. Finally, "Mi Son" is the most traditional composition here, the sharp report of a snare drum being split, frequency-adjusted and panned across the stereo field as unaffected guitar riffs rise tall and collapse like pillars. There is little here that can be easily subsumed by any of the musical persona's honed by the players on hand. The album establishes its own stylistic foundation, and as such is infuriating and wonderful in its many resistances.
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