Recordings
Joëlle Léandre, François Houle, Raymond Strid. Last Seen Headed: Live at Sons d'Hiver. Few musicians in the international improvising community can find as many varied settings with which to create an ever-expanding musical language as can French bassist Joëlle Léandre. She appears here as part of a trio with Vancouver-based clarinettist Fran[...] Read more
Giuseppe Ielasi. (Another) Stunt. I suspect that Giuseppe Ielasi named his three-vinyl EP project Stunt as a nod to those who know him better as an improvisational guitarist. My expectations of some intense minimal guitar compositions were overturned at first hearing as I found myself listening to an album full of needle-[...] Read more
The Allison Cameron Band. The Allison Cameron Band. Toronto’s Rat-Drifting label has long been committed to releasing sneakily hybridized and organically concept-informed music. Work that is deliciously fraught with odd details and the idiosyncrasies of the community from which it springs. Cameron’s[...] Read more
Ross Bolleter. Night Kitchen: An Hour of Ruined Piano. Australian Ross Bolleter has devoted himself to ruined pianos: instruments found exposed—in different degrees—to the elements, having in that exposure developed a quirky originality, radically at odds with the piano’s usual ideal of uniformity. Cracked soundboards vibrate[...] Read more
Debashis Sinha. Anudrutam. Lean, economical and crisp, Anudrutam infuses a minimalist techno sensibility with acoustic percussion and naturalistic field recordings (collected by Sinha himself in Kolkata). While the bareness used by some similarly oriented artists tends to emphasize the cold, machine-like precision[...] Read more
Brian Ruryk. Cycle of Fords. While the ingredients in any recent Brian Ruryk release are basically the same—rapid-fire editing, rubbery cassette-tape contortions, anxious Sonny-Sharrock-on-amphetamines acoustic guitar scribblings, torrents of debris (aural and actual) flying across the stereo field—[...] Read more
ROVA Saxophone Quartet & Nels Cline Singers. The Celestial Septet. The Celestial Septet combines two institutions of California’s experimental and improvised music, the ROVA Saxophone Quartet and guitarist Nels Cline’s instrumental trio with bass and drums, ironically named the Nels Cline Singers. This music is rooted in the free-jazz[...] Read more
Yannis Kyriakides. ANTICHAMBER. Dutch-Cypriot composer Yannis Kyriakides is better known for his extended multimedia and music-theatre works, but the ten pieces collected on this double-CD demonstrate that writing for smaller ensembles affords him equally fertile ground for creative exploration. The album offers[...] Read more
Grutronic. Essex Foam Party. Essex Foam Party sees Grutronic, a free improvising collective, join forces with guests vibraphonist Orphy Robinson and sampler Paul Obermayer. Mixed among the moist pulses and triggered cross textures that characterize much of the music are interludes of keyboard comping and runs from[...] Read more
FURT. Sense. Two methods of creation play out on this disc by FURT, the British electronic composition-performance duo of Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer. The track Uranus is a forty-six-minute studio composition developed over a two-year period. In contrast, Curtains, the second track on the CD,[...] Read more
Lori Freedman. Bridge. Bridge largely emulates the pattern of one of Freedman’s solo clarinet concerts, exploring the relationships between composition, interpretation, and improvisation. If composition and improvisation were once separated by a gulf, here they’re constructed as a continuously[...] Read more
The Element Choir. At Rosedale United. Christine Duncan leads the most unlikely ensemble devoted to collective improvisation, Toronto’s fifty-one-voice Element Choir. The choir’s improvisation is strongly shaped by Duncan’s ongoing “conduction.” In performance, members respond to a series of[...] Read more
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