AMN Reviews: Matt Turner – Virion Impasto [Icker Records IR004]

With this set of eight highly unorthodox improvisations for cello played with hairless bow, Matt Turner offers his own perspective on a kind of acoustic concrete music. On all eight tracks, Turner concocts sounds that one would be hard put to assign to a cello. In this general atmosphere of wood on wood frottage some gestures do seem to reveal themselves as having been played on a string instrument: On the final track at least, the sound of plucked or struck strings above and/or below the bridge emerge. Elsewhere rising and falling frequencies seem to signal the circular motion of the bow on an unidentifiable surface, while other sounds—of scratching, gnawing and assorted varieties of friction–approach the purely acousmatic.