Remote Viewers, The

To The North

Label: Remote Viewers Country: UK

"Yet another change of line-up in The Remote Viewers, now a septet consisting of four saxophonists (Dave Petts, Adrian Northover, Sue Lynch and Caroline Kraabel), an equally eminent rhythm section (bassist John Edwards and drummer Mark Sanders) and Rosa Lynch-Northover on marimba. The compositions encompassed by To The North were entirely penned by Petts, a matchless voice whose reminiscences of suggestion appear to be somewhat located in certain reed-fuelled parallelisms heard in early Henry Cow (and, more specifically and perhaps coincidentally, in the intro of National Health's "Binoculars" on Of Queues And Cures). Still, the exclusivity of these seven pieces remains visible all over the album's 42 minutes. There is no indulgence for undemanding consonance - not for a second, I mean; the junction between all those tangentially unkind sax lines (sounding remarkably extemporaneous during the freer sections) and the atypical pulse dictated by Sanders, Edwards and Lynch-Northover constitutes an opportunity for listening to fairly awkward music without getting lost in the warren of gratuitous complicatedness. The playing is sensible, respectful of the scores while ever open to further interpretations; the timbres are rightly amalgamated. An element of newness (in regard to TRW's previous outings) is the use of short snippets of environmental recordings: besides steps and engines caught in other selections, "All The Conspirators" begins with a few seconds of a bird intoning a three-pitch code that literally disintegrates my heart, as if the instrumental merits weren't already enough. Get your copy soon, this stuff is brilliant."-Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes