Beins / Dorner / Hayward / Krebs

Phosphor 2

Label: Potlatch Country: France

"My abiding memory of Phosphor in concert at the Instants Chavirés outside Paris in May 2002 is the image of the musicians huddled together afterwards in earnest post-gig post mortem. Less-is-more Improv was a serious business, and the eight members of the Berlin based collective - Burkhard Beins (percussion/zither), Alessandro Bosetti (saxophone), Axel Dorner (trumpet/electronics), Robin Hayward (tuba), Annette Krebs (guitar/tapes), Andrea Neumann (inside piano/mixing board), Michael Renkel (guitar/computer) and Ignaz Schick (turntable) - were its leading exponents back then. Seven years later, this follow-up to Phosphor's 2001 debut is a good opportunity to assess how the same musicians - without Bosetti, who has since left Berlin - have evolved in the intervening years.

While some improvisors of the Malfatti/Sugimoto persuasion have continued down the quiet path, playing even less and allowing silence to play an ever greater role, Phosphor - the group, rather than the individual musicians playing solo - have opted to play more, using a wider range of sounds, all the while miraculously retaining the leisurely pace and textural clarity of their earlier music. The only thing austere and minimal about these six tracks is the generic album and track titling; the music is as colourful and crystalline as the photograph that adorns the cover (not phosphorus, but ascorbic acid). Barely a minute into P7, Renkel's nylon string guitar is scribbling all over a sonic space bustling with activity. Dorner's pitchless machine gun splatter, Hayward's rubbery flapping, Krebs's scrumpled steel wool and the hiss of Beins's drums swept by polystyrene blocks are all instantly recognisable, but there's a real sense of teamwork here, a rare and welcome example of seven improvisors playing together without trampling each other to death. The pacing and precision is impeccable; this is music making of the highest order, marking not a break with but an extension of a rich tradition of European free improvisation."-Dan Warburton