04/11/2006

Phil Durrant first gained notice as a violinist working in the English free-improvisation milieu with John Butcher, John Russell, and Chris Burn, among others. In the past decade, he has worked extensively in groups like Mimeo, combining real-time electronics and manipulation with acoustic instruments, especially those using extended techniques. On Three Dances Durrant omits his violin entirely for sampler, synthesizer, and treatments. While Durrant works wholly in the electronic realm, his partners reside in the acoustic, with Bertrand Denzler playing tenor saxophone and Burkhard Beins playing percussion and objects.

It is initially difficult to separate this music from its apparent processes. It is rarely clear what musician or instrument is doing what. A high whistle might be a synthesizer or a saxophone moving closer to a microphone. A listener unfamiliar with extended saxophone techniques could listen to the CD's three improvisations without ever imagining that there's a tenor saxophone in the group. Like John Butcher, the Swiss Denzler, who has worked with John Wolf Brennan and the French group Hubbub, uses circular breathing and an assortment of techniques emphasizing key and pad noise and the grainy, gritty passage of air through the instrument to create a vocabulary of sounds that can suggest bats playing a pipe organ in a chasm. Similarly, Beins' collection of clicks and rattles do not immediately suggest a particular source, but expand in the hyper-resonant space that may be a compound of the acoustic and electronic. Oddly enough, it is the occasional wobble of an oscillator that is the least abstract, the most readily traceable to its source.

The idea of non-attribution of a sound seems central to this music. Its approach to identity (of sounds, players, listeners) is one with its approach to process and time. The acoustic and the electronic, the original and the treated, blur, exchange, and become one. The process becomes more explicit as the three pieces advance from the relatively sparse Rondo and Bolero to the longer Tumble, with its dense washes of sound and sustained whistles that stretch time to the breaking point. It is a new auditory space coming into being before (after?) our ears—a tranquil, meditative delight.

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