What to do with a vibrating column of air, encased in metal and pierced with openings? Jean-Luc Guionnet constructs music anew, exploring timbre and overtone in minutely detailed expositions sprinkled with silence and shaded with metallic gravel. The slightest of melodies get short-circuited to explore some corner, before halting to re-group and re-launch. The room enhances the alto sound and helps it hang there for us to examine. Split tones and harmonics lay alongside whatever central note is being explored, and ever-so-quiet audience sounds remind us that it's all happening in front of people, in the moment.

Notes get bent, stoppered, ballooned or popped, hammered and flattened. Guionnet examines short phrases by splitting them and isolating the individual notes, re-shaping or laminating each. A catalogue of intimate exaggerations and modifications. A series of pops gives way to manic expulsions of fragmented song, a slow motion dance caught on decaying celluloid. There are rapid moves from one extreme to another, loud/sour into quiet/savory into scream-singing into quick-quick reed biting. You'll lose track if you try to list them.

There is a bit of Tamio Shiraishi in spots, that high frequency squeal extended and layered with harmonic filigree, with two or three things moving and shifting at once. It's no less astounding for all its subtlety. In previous recordings, Guionnet had augmented his horns with tubes and various kinds of electro-acoustic preparations, but here he stands alone with just his alto and still manages to astound. A welcome addition to the history of solo saxophone recordings.