"I don't know any details about either the studio session that took place on January 6th, 2004 between keyboardist John Tilbury and percussionist Eddie Prevost, or the process by which the resulting tapes became discrete moments. This makes it a bit difficult for me to know how to proceed. The recording is over 75 minutes long and consists of eight cuts of widely varying length. Most of the music is exquisitely beautiful-as beautiful, in my humble opinion, as anything else you are likely to hear this year. Unfortunately, somewhere around ten minutes of it isn't much good at all. Now, if Tilbury and Prevost had put out an absolutely perfect 65-minute (or even 55-minute) disc-say just by excluding the meandering third track-people might be whispering things involving "recording of the decade" or "pinnacle of their careers." I have a sense, however (in spite of my above-admitted absence of actual information about this recording), of why this track was included in the final product.It has a very cool final minute that sounds as if it might have come from an early Cage piece for prepared piano. There was no way to retain that clunkily wonderful coda while scuttling the rest of the cut, so (perhaps at the last moment?) it was decided to keep the whole 11:18 piece intact and put out a very long album. I believe that this was a mistake, but, as is quite well known, it is now pretty easy to program CD players to skip this or that section of a recording-at least when the artists are kind enough to provide reference points on their discs. Let us therefore proceed as if there were no track entitled "S" and discuss only the absolutely terrific remaining discrete moments. Tilbury plays organ as well as piano (and prepared piano) here, and it is interesting to note the great extent to which he tailors his playing to his instrument. Much of his work on piano utilizes a technique that is entirely appropriate for the great 1950s piano pieces by Feldman and Cage (more Cagehere than I'm used to from him). But on organ Tilbury adopts the Palestine/Ligeti approach of holding chords or tones for a very long time and letting the strangely irregular internal pulses that result do the hypnotizing. He understands, that is, the difference between a ringing stringed percussion instrument and a keyboard simulacrum of a wind instrument. As one might expect, he's great on both horns: he seems to have a perfect knack for landing on just those pitches, rhythms, and sounds that will produce the perfect effect. His remarkable touch is at work here, of course, but there's a deep wisdom evident too. Prevost brings his arsenal of percussion, traps, tam-tam, stringed barrel and bows, and, as always, he knows how to get the most out of each one. The long cymbal hisses he creates to accompany some of Tilbury's high-pitched drones would give Nakamura a run for his money. Unsurprisingly, Prevost's high degree of sensitivity and consummate skill is a pretty good combinationwhen it comes to improvised music. Naturally, it also helps that these guys have been playing together since long before many of Bagatellen's most avid readers were born. Some of their music is delicate and pointillistic with wide spaces between sounds, but there are also rich, thick webs and, as indicated, Cage/Kleeube Goldberg thunkity-thunk machines. The two men also provide a hefty helping of what seems to me missing from too many of the "non-I" recordings I hear: drama. (For those who don't like drama, there's sonic variety-which may or may not be acceptable these days: I don't know.) For all its multiplicity, however, unlike Tilbury's recent fiasco with Tippett and Riley, the vision is constant and coherent throughout. discrete moments is so so beautiful."-Walter Horn, bagatellen.com