"Fred Frith is a world renowned improvisor, composer and multi-instrumentalist who has positioned himself on the contemporary music scene between rock and jazz, improvisation and compostition. Experimental saxophonist and bass clarinetist Hans Koch has a similarly superb reputation. In the past few years Hans has dedicated himself to the quieter side of improvisation.

Both musicians have extended the possibilities of their instruments and stepped into new territories. The pair have known each other since the Nineties. As a guest, Frith took part in the "hardcore chamber music" of trio Koch-Schütz-Studer.

On the new album You Are Here they create intriguing sound worlds and fascinating tone structures purely by improvising. It is the music of two mature masters who have worked all their life to develop their own musical language. The duo allows them to make full use of their artistic capability to the great pleasure of the listener."-Intakt Records

"Natty Bumppos both, Fred Frith and Hans Koch were pioneers on their respective instruments in the realm of free improvisation who have seen firsthand the changes decades have wrought on the idiom. Like the hero of James Fennimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Saga the career longevity of Frith and Koch has sometimes led to them being forgotten or passed over for younger facsimiles. Neither is the sort to go congenially into obscurity and both have pushed back through reliably expanding discographies over the years. You Are Here is an excellent placeholder of their partnership and felicitous reminder for listeners of their present creative improvised music coordinates.

Recorded on a spring day in Basel, Switzerland last year the seven free improvisations are recalcitrant and uncompromising from the jump. Koch jockeys between bass clarinet, soprano and tenor saxophones and there's good reason why the fourth instrumental entry next to his name is "spit". Viscous rivulets of saliva pass back and forth regularly through the mouthpiece and tubes of his implements adding glottal and sibilant accents to the alien reed-borne creations. Frith is similarly ruthless on his guitar, affixing it with various preparations and only rarely playing it with anything resembling conventionality.

"Just a Crack" features oscillating drones conjured on amplified strings and avian soprano with form arising fleetingly in favor of an overarching aqueous presence. The specific dimensions of the performance space are a mystery, but Frith fills them with vast clouds of rumbling sound. "Strange Is the Night Where Black Stars Rise" echoes the ominousness of its title as slabs of angry feedback collide and converge with the distortions of booming tenor overtones. Even when moving together at volumes that amount to a collective murmur, Frith and Koch bring the ambient existential menace.

Percussive reed plosives open "Exercises Chronologiques" with answers from Frith's metallic scrapes and percolating investigations with amplification. Koch carves out an increasingly frenetic corner on tenor as his colleague hammers away on the body of a guitar. A weird reverie ensues with Frith playing an almost-melody, dipped in dulcet electricity the nimbus of an underlying drone audible around the edges. Koch engineers a Doppler reed whistle in response, scraping the limit of sensory perception. The sonorous mirage is summarily shattered in a cascade of intemperate dissonance.

"Lots Out Large" finds Koch's bass clarinet navigating a floating firmament of percussive ephemera, fragments of quixotically tuneful phrasing interspersing with serrated reed slurs and piercing peals of noise. Frith moves between similar extremes, thumping out a tumbling rhythm alongside Koch's ululations. Audience-oriented amenities appear but an afterthought in these sorts of heated and headlong exchanges with both players trusting that anyone signing on for the ride will be willing to forgo assumptions in favor of the attendant rewards attainable in wherever the pair undergo. It's an unspoken, unwritten compact, but one that's been a reliable bargain throughout their careers just as it remains here."-Derek Taylor, Dusted Magazine