Fabbriciani, Roberto / Robin Hayward

nella basilica

Label: Another Timbre Country: UK

"This is the first CD of improvised music featuring Roberto Fabbriciani, one of the giants of contemporary music. Fabbriciani was the instrumentalist with whom Luigi Nono worked most closely in the last two decades of his life, playing in the premieres of virtually all of the composer's late works. On nella basilica Fabbriciani improvises with Robin Hayward, the phenomenal Berlin-based tuba player with whom he has worked on several recent realisations of Nono's music. Their improvisations - recorded in the Basilica di San Domenico in the Tuscan hilltown of Arezzo - create a unique sound, largely based on the extraordinarily low tones produced both by the tuba and the hyperbass flute that Fabbriciani played for much of the session."-Another Timbre

"Both musicians have developed their instruments, Hayward using a new microtonal valve system, and Fabbriciani his self-designed hyperbass flute-over twelve metres of tubing! The latter produces fearsome sounds at the lower threshold of human hearing, meaning they are felt in the internal organs as much as heard. Overall, the combination of tuba and the lower frequency flutes creates a bottom-heavy soundscape in which boundaries between tuba and flutes are blurred. This is embellished by the players' percussive sounds-pad noise from the flutes and impact on the body of the tuba-and the characteristic whistling wind-tunnel sound of breath passing through the instruments' tubing. Otherwise, it is the lingering, slowly-evolving tones of the instruments that dominate. There are no rapidly-articulated passages here; everything moves at a stately pace, allowing plenty of time to wallow in the varied textures of the sounds.... Awesome."-John Eyles, All About Jazz