I once lived at the top of a hill in Puerto Rico. In the afternoon, I would watch torrential rain clouds roll in, pour on the town and dissipate as they crossed the valley. I could see each fiber of the pandemonian atmospheric violence, hear the booming terror that I would dread if caught in it on my bike; but from that distant perch, I just marveled at the splendor.
Similarly, percussionist, educator and luthier (check out his hand-crafted bows) Tatsuya Nakatani and veteran soprano saxophonist Michel Doneda treat us to an eye of a storm point of view on this 2007 recording (Nakatani's first release on his Nakatani-Kobo label). Idiosyncratically, there is potential for egregious assault, but the duo hovers in a churning panoply of shapes governed with strained self-control. In other words, the disc is savage, but Nakatani and Doneda usually keep the volume lowered to a level that allows for each nuance to be heard.
Though known for his collection of gongs and meditative resonant solo performances, Nakatani's output here is scampered, the gong work agitated, restless and living from moment to moment rather than direction-based. He's more likely to creak and scrape and brush his metals with various objects while matched against Doneda's dynamic purrs, beeps and squirms. Quite often, the two end up gracefully lost in each other's textural timbre with, say, Doneda's flutter-honks and Nakatani's rapid-fire chafes, forming an over-heated apparatus of rhythmic and pitch materials ("Butterfly Hesitant"); when they detach, the percussionist gently coaxes a dizzy, sliding rumble from singing bowls underneath Doneda's warbling whistle — then Nakatani slinks back with bow to join the sound. On "Circle Lamp", they begin with a thump and move in a pointillistic procession of nodes, ethereal whispers and muted blasts, then break and call-and-response like screeching macaws. This micro / macro juggling act of combinations never tires with each word of the duo's secret language seeming purposeful, technically masterful (particularly during the closer, "The Bee Is Short", when the music launches into a pyrotechnic hard-bop mutant).
Nakatani and Doneda have created a new manufactured environment that is as much music as situation; and as you can tell, this is the type of art where a grocery list of details is of little use — you know, like trying to describe Pollack's amazing abstraction, The Sea-Wolf with, "Well, there's a red arrow, and a lot of white squiggles". As with that work, you can sum-up White Stone Black Lamp with one word: arresting.
Comments and Feedback:
|
Matt Mitchell:
Sophie Agnel / John Butcher:
Damon Smith:
Alexander von Schlippenbach / Dag Magnus Narvesen Duo:
Lotte Anker / Kamil Piotrowicz / Jacob Anderskov:
Killick Hinds:
Isotope Ensemble:
Satoko Fujii:
Dennis Egberth:
Barry Chabala:
