Recording in Madrid in 2002, and at The Groupe de Musique Electroniqueacoustique d'Albi-Tarn in France in 2004, saxophonist Wade Matthews presents 9 solo works using close miking, circular breathing, percussive sounds from the instruments themselves, and other creative and unusual extended techniques, in an idiosyncratic and fascinating album of personal expression.
"The first word that comes to mind is "attack", even if this nightmarish volley of grenades lobbed our way by Wade Matthews turns out to be, as he explains in the booklet, an intricate circuit of unimaginable pipe dreams that materialize incredibly right in our ear holes. Close miking guarantees fantastic detail in every perceivable nuance of Matthews' bass clarinet and alto flute, generating mesmerizing patterns of circular breathing and percussive tongue clucking that sound like a one-man shamanic tabla / flute duo. Extended techniques raise the curtain on an otherwise invisible world of gremlins and gizmos dancing through a forest of unfathomable harmonics. Horse-like whinnies and tiny shards of regular timbre spring out of the alembics every once in a while to remind us we're not listening to some deranged plumbing system, while growling mixtures of voice and venomous insufflations will have you wondering what possible use there is for the synthesizer anymore. Matthews is anartist whose palette contains so many colours that describing it as "kaleidoscopic" sounds almost offensive."-Massimo Ricci, Paris Transatlantic