"The music on Mutable is a totally acoustic sonic exploration. It is an investigation that has led to the development of certain extended techniques in order to discover the ultimate limits of the sound of the saxophone and to try to create new sounds on the instrument."-Relative Pitch

"Art is perhaps the only sphere of our existence in which the awareness of one's own limits becomes a decisive exhortation to transcend them. There is in fact no real risk, apart from a possible failure - but such in whose judgement? -, nothing is lost and everything has to be conquered. In this sense, the case of the Catalan saxophonist Don Malfon (Alfonso Muñoz) is exemplary, albeit uncommon. He seems to conceive his entire performative contribution as a challenge to the materiality of the instrument, a questioning that demands as many answers as possible and, as in a scientific laboratory, tends to trigger a process of ever new hypotheses and verifications.

For years now, Malfon has been pursuing a discourse, or rather a linguistic endeavor, similar to that of trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj: but where the Lebanese experimenter uses any means, including electronic ones, to distort and reinvent the sound of his brass from scratch, Malfon sticks strictly to the acoustic dimension, while at the same time expanding the timbral spectrum of the saxophone by means of the most diverse objects and extended techniques. And if On Resonance (Sirulita, 2020) already collected a large number of curious and surprising etudes, the sessions brought together on MUTABLE even border on the improbable.

The intuition of the extraneous element shifts here from a brut-esque and almost provocative approach to absolute technical control, to an expressive confidence that could even inaugurate a new canon. The rumbling metallic clangours and screeches in the foreground, originating from the vibration of appendages inserted in the body of the instrument, are inextricably intertwined with rough sustained notes, multiple hypertones and residual hisses, concomitant and equal facets of a breath that becomes polymorphous, schizoid - indeed, constantly mutable.

The Catalan saxophonist's act of strength evokes a steampunk avant-garde yet to come, a glimpse of how someday, with the likely decline of digital civilisation and the consequent return to analogue order, the outermost stylistic remnants of the original jazz verb will present themselves. MUTABLE actualises exciting, at times even disturbing, visions in forty minutes of pure sonic otherness, but above all makes Don Malfon's a simply unavoidable name in the current free-impro panorama. Due mention must also be made of the prolific New York label Relative Pitch, which should be kept on the radar as much for the forays of veterans as for the first moves of talented up-and-comers."-Esoteros