Recorded live at London's prestigious Queen Elizabeth Hall last summer SHARK! captures all the onstage excitement, artistic agony and electronic ecstasy of UK drummer Chris Cutler and Detroit born harpist Zeena Parkins’ concert together.
Both players can be heard attacking their instruments conventionally and outrageously, reinventing and deconstructing the shape and sound of drums and harp to produce music that caresses one minute and bites down hard the next. At one point Cutler uses two rolled-up magazines to pound his kit while Parkins deploys crocodile clips and a steel bolt device to produce a drone from her instrument that will tingle the scalp of the most hardened listener of improvised music.
Like the thrashing, hungry and dangerous ocean carnivore it is named after, SHARK! comes across as being frenzied, untamed and wholly unpredictable.
The day after the concert a review by Phil Kime
appeared on Internet Gibralter. "Quite superb," he raved, "I would
have been happy listening for ten times as long."
source: RéR promotional onesheet