"Invisible airwaves crackle with life ..." The vintage lyrics figure and refigure crazily in my head as Ignaz Schick's electronics and samples, Anaïs Tuerlinckx's prepared piano and the saxophone and clarinet of Joachim Zoepf are themselves reconfigured throughout these two superbly recorded 2023 concert performances. Once it is ascertained that winds occupy centerstage, electronics and turntable the right channel and prepared piano the left, the quick-shod interactive rhetorical bate and switch are endlessly fun to observe.
Dig the little fanfare 6:48 into the more than aptly titled "Electroacoustic Kaleidoscope" as it bullies its way beyond the roil, rush and clatter surrounding it. Like Coltrane's "Meditations", we are offered a bit of near-tonal respite amidst the ordered scree, a wall of noise that just as quickly dissolves into strands and streams of decomposing luminosity in fragments. Indeed, and as if the waves and particles the ensemble is so adept at dispersing weren't "Romantic" enough, Zoepf is to be commended for breathtakingly beautiful use of vibrato and that unified disparity it's nearly useless to call multiphonics. They come to the fore with a vengeance as Tuerlinckx brings the thunder of post-Cagian piano strings. Shick challenges at every turn with cinematics to rival Roland Kayn's later work, as we hear slicing the room ambiance at 10:29. Those macrocosmic gestures are complemented by the most deliciously minute details. It's so easy to get lost in the key clicks, metallic piano rasps and electro-glugs at 17:09 that the forest threatens to disappear for the trees, and that's only the first piece!
The quasi-palendromically titled "Turntableturn" finds the players switching up the location, turntable still off to the right but with winds and keys more diffuse in their presentation but listing left. This does not bean that clarity is sacrificed, far from it! Moment to moment analysis seems beside the point as shapes, shadows and fantastical figures emerge that would make E.T.A. Hoffmann proud, but special mention must be made of what my traditional ears can't help but register as the chromatically inflected G-Major vignette eases its way forward around 5:30, bubbling and broiling volcanically at its foundation. It's all matched by a C-major bit ten minutes later, but none of this is really important. Beyond the vast architectures and resultant dynamic shifts, the jump-cut juxtapositions and the obvious virtuosity, it's all such good fun! These are obviously performers deep in the throes of musical spontaneity, and whatever else occurs, it ensures that each gesture crackles with the palpability of collaborative energies.