Recorded live at London's Cafe OTO on April 23, 2024, Moth Wings Beating Air Incised documents the first trio performance by David Toop, cellist Ecka Mordecai, and Swiss saxophonist Christian Kobi, unfolding as a single extended improvisation in which three highly individual approaches to sound converge with remarkable sensitivity.

Toop draws from an idiosyncratic collection of flutes, card, bow, leaves, cassette, African fiddle, phone apps, rattles, bone-conduction devices and other objects, creating an elusive field of rustling textures, breath, friction, electronic traces and unstable resonances. Mordecai's cello moves between sustained tone, fragile harmonics, grainy bow pressure and near-silence, while Kobi's soprano and tenor saxophones contribute finely controlled breath, multiphonics and narrow strands of pitch.

Rather than developing through conventional exchanges or clearly defined solos, the performance proceeds through close listening and continual shifts of density, the musicians frequently blurring the distinction between instrumental sound, object noise and environmental texture. Small gestures acquire unusual weight: scraped surfaces, bowed strings, breath tones and faint electronic sounds emerge, overlap and disappear, leaving stretches of charged space in their wake.

The title and accompanying text by Toop evoke moths, leaves, dust, incisions, breath and barely perceptible movement, imagery well suited to music whose character lies in delicate physical detail and fleeting sonic events. An exceptionally attentive document of spontaneous collective sound-making from three improvisers concerned as much with silence, texture and the material qualities of sound as with instrumental identity.

"Sponge mites swarm a black map
Overrun then cut by mayflies
Void
switch /part to Moth wings beating air incised
a graver
lined and block
partial to upper frequencies
Scordatura
its flowers
Vespertine
delirious A night shade
falling into
cardiac arrhythmia
Sharp stop
intaglio Stabbed by silence
The ink was invisible
Dust sprinkled by a pollinator heard as low ground hum
Bare scented wave
faint as rumour Bird beak incision
Hole puncher with cautious tread Aeolian spirits
Breath pressed through a reedy chisel We collected mushrooms in the forest
like children Black cap for a funeral bell Friction of hair a motion meets resistance pushes down Leaf stress and still
slashed shut to return
a rider moving fast Dust rising as a screen
choked up Time slows a sludge of stop
examination of parts in thin whiskers tips softer than a slow nocturnal Mammal fur
intimate as spit And in the groaning
shredded history scraped apart to fibres /fragile barely standing upright as if poised to stop Its nervous disposition shivers in the wind
sings concentrate to be a touch a stroke a scratch
the burden lightly held as breath exhaust and sleep"-David Toop