Frith, Fred & Annie Lewandowski

Long as in short, Walk as in run

Label: Ninth World Country: Denmark

"Fred Moten once wrote, "Consider the history of what has been done to strings in America: pulled, broken, frayed, bent, yanked, plucked, twisted, fingered, thumped, thumbed, rubbed, burned, fuzzed, tuned, plugged, tied, bitten, bottle-necked, box-car'd, mail-ordered, masturbated, remastered-they've been suspended between leeway and seizure all for an open set of sounds." Moten's list looks paltry compared with the bestiary of sounds offered by Annie Lewandowski, Fred Frith, and the 251 strings they scratch, strangle, and whack in these eight improvisations.

A quick glance through the track titles on this album suggests a certain aviary theme, but my listening takes me instead to thoughts about the sea. The music evokes the soundscape of maritime labor-not the labor of humans, but that of the ships that carry their junk food, staplers, and tin gift boxes across the globe. Rusted, massive ships creeping into the harbor in the early morning, unseen but certainly not unheard.

Just a few weeks before this recording was made in Oakland, California, three Super-Post Panamax container cranes from Shanghai, perched atop a special ship that could lower itself in the water, slipped a few feet under the Bay Bridge on their way to the Port of Oakland. The delivery was made at low tide in order to avoid a nasty scrape on the bottom of the bridge. But what if the captain lacked the patience to wait? What would that slow collision sound like? What if there had been a contact microphone attached to each of these cranes' 253 feet? Would we hear grunts and screeches like the ones on <i>Long as in Short, Walk as in Run?</i>

Although Frith's array of effects and techniques is, as always, simply dazzling, I once thought the individual sounds of this duo were utterly anonymous, escaping any attempt to assign them to one or the other player. I now hear the differences clearly. Frith extends lines of thought, pushes his materials into new configurations, while Lewandowski always works as the slow anchor. Shifting intensities into long moments, she has the uncanny talent of transforming even the most quicksilver exchanges into patient, careful murmurs. In some sense, the relocation of Lewandowski's activities into the inside of her piano was neces- sitated by a bad accident that left one hand scarred. The duets recorded here are therefore not only the sonic record of a student learning to follow (and also to direct) her teacher, but also a pianist discovering a new choreography of the instrument, turned inside out. The constantly shifting-but always vast-dimensions of this encounter and this discovery are inflected by unex- pected motives that leaven the proceedings considerably: curiosity, tenderness, mischief."-Benjamin Piekut, from the liner notes