Quebec improvisers Pierre-Yves Martel on Viola da Gamba, objects, and feedback, Eric Normand on electric bass and snare drum, are joined by Berlin pianist Magda Mayas for two extended works of free improvisation, manipulating and contorting strings with an electroacoustic edge, dark ruminations of exquisite detail, patience, and adroit interaction.
Label: Tour de Bras Catalog ID: TDB9025cd Squidco Product Code: 25256
Format: CDR Condition: New Released: 2017 Country: France Packaging: Plastic Gatefold sleeve with fold-over insert Recorded at Salle Desjardins-Telus, in Rimouski, Quebec, Canada, on November 17th, 2013, by Robin Servant
"So many strings - almost everything you can imagine done to a string, done. (And then anomalously 3⁄4 way through the second piece - a bell.) This grundgy mid-range recording is everywhere distortion. Despite Pierre-Yve's precise plucking and smooth bow - the air of the music is noisy, (is that amps hissing)?
Eric's guitar growls through a snare. Magda's sound board - a space for hittings, rubbings, pluckings, scrapings, cries and whispers.
There is a searching ongoingness, a moving forward from one state to another. 6 minutes into track 1 emerges a compelling coherence - for a few minutes banded. After, they revert to dark, brooding intentional polyphony.
When a child, I experienced ambiguous nightmares I described as oscillating between the rough and the smooth. The smooth was excruciating not because it was unpleasant, but because you knew it would end to be replaced by the rough.
This is compelling, nightmarish music."-Jim Denley (Sydney, 2014)