More frequently heard playing guitar and prepared guitar in the context of jazz and improvised music, Rainer Wiens performs here on kalimbas—African thumb pianos possessing a distinctive metallic resonance—which are heard prominently at the beginning and end of this unusual series of compositions. While Wiens uses five other musicians here, the music’s dominant quality is its nakedness: most often there’s only one or two instruments playing at a time and the work is intensely focused on single melodic lines and individual instrumental textures. Wiens’ compositional materials include non-repeating scales and bird calls, further emphasizing the sense of linear development, There’s also a sense of a music that’s been reduced to the purest forms of expression and sound, a kind of hypothetical ancestry that’s emphasized in the instruments as well, with Jean Derome playing flute, Malcolm Goldstein and—in one appearance—Joshua Zubot violins, and Jean René viola. When saxophonist Frank Lozano appears, he’s playing soprano saxophone with a dry, double-reed sound and close attention to vocal-pitch inflections. There’s something very powerful at work in this elemental music, as it seeks the most evanescent spaces and then manages to reside there, as in a kind of dream space. The most powerful work on the CD is also the longest—the ten-minute title track focussing on near-unison micro-melodies in the strings.
