"This recording is more conventional only because the instruments are limited to electric guitar (Lash) and drums, percussion (Wastell). The opening cut, "potential" sound like the artists started tuning up and never got around to playing anything else. The sound is so rich that you will be perfectly happy with that, if genuine free jazz is your thing."-Kenneth Blanchard

Bringing together two prolific figures in the UK's improvised music community, Dominic Lash and Mark Wastell explore a stripped yet expansive duo format on Polyvalent Creativity, focusing on electric guitar and a wide palette of drums and percussion. Despite the apparent conventionality of the instrumentation, the session quickly departs from idiomatic playing, embracing a language rooted in texture, gesture, and sonic detail rather than pulse or harmonic progression.

Lash approaches the electric guitar less as a melodic lead instrument than as a source of sustained tones, fractured lines, and quietly shifting harmonic fields, often allowing resonance and subtle amplification artifacts to shape the music's contour. Wastell responds with an equally nuanced approach to percussion, moving fluidly between cymbal washes, dry strikes, and tactile surface sounds, creating an environment where rhythm dissolves into timbre and interaction becomes the central focus.

The duo's interplay suggests a continuous process of emergence, where sounds feel discovered rather than declared, and where even the most tentative gestures carry weight. At times evoking the exploratory edge of free jazz while remaining grounded in reductionist listening practices, Polyvalent Creativity unfolds as a patient, richly detailed study in collective improvisation, where density and sparseness coexist in a constantly shifting balance.