As stated on its web page:
Plus Timbre is a netlabel dedicated to experimental and improvisational music, aiming to foster and promote material in the widest possible variety of relevant musical styles.
We have reviewed a number of Plus Timbre releases over the last few years, compiled here. Original articles were written by Daniel Barbiero.
Castor Morse – Au Bureau Des Rêveries (2023)
The name of sound artist Castor Morse’s studio is La Poétique du Timbre—a perfectly chosen name, as his new release, the evocatively titled Au bureau des rêveries demonstrates. Working with objects, prepared gongs, samples, and electronic processing, Castor Morse put together a series of six sound collages based on the sheer sensuality of timbral contrasts, many of them produced by the sounds of various materials being struck, rubbed, scraped, and shaken. The compositions, which generally rely on unpitched sounds and gestural organization, tend toward the abstract, but the occasional appearances of flute, the human voice, and birdsong add a touch of the organic.
Boss / Magliocchi – Schnellissimo (2023)
Like Castor Morse’s release, Schnellisimo, a duo recording by Swiss violinist Matthias Boss and Italian percussionist Marcello Magliocchi, situates itself within the fertile field opened up by timbral difference. Strings and percussion tend to occupy opposite poles of the textural spectrum; Boss and Magliocchi take this opposition as a given and a goad, and build on it with a set of improvisations that develop through elaborately prepared and resolved events of tension and release. Magliocchi’s cymbal work and freely metered pulses push and pull the collective sound through dynamic surges and ebbs, which Boss further shapes and intensifies with an expressionistically taut mixing of legato and staccato phrasing, and raw, extended technique.
Gussoni Northover Magliocchi – A Castle of Ghosts (2022)
Recorded just this past March in Genoa’s Castello d’Albertis, A Castle of Ghosts is a performance featuring two improvisations from the trio of Bruno Gussoni (C flute and shakuhachi); Adrian Northover (soprano saxophone) and Marcello Magliocchi (percussion). It’s easy to imagine the ghosts of the title in the ethereal sounds of the flutes and the sharper-edged, yet still wind-borne, sound of the soprano saxophone. Holding a musically proper balance between these two unevenly matched winds is crucial; given its timbre and volume, the saxophone is capable of washing away either of the flutes. Fortunately, Northover and Gussoni are able to work out a relationship of symmetry based on an intuitive sense of their instruments’ complementarity of range and tone. All of that would be for naught if not for Magliocchi’s sensitivity as a percussionist; his well-judged selection of sounds from a palette of metal, wood, and membrane is a vital part of this music, which particularly on the first improvisation pivots on the delicate interplay of the two wind instruments. The second improvisation finds the trio prone to explore less conventional, unpitched sounds
Bertoni / Salis / Sanna – Hidden Parallels (2021)
The hidden parallels of this collaboration between Antonio Bertoni (cello, prepared piano, tuning forks) and the duo of percussionists Paolo Sanna and Giacomo Salis would appear to be drawn between the three compositions the trio chose to interpret and the original, unconventional ways in which their own contributions shaped the actual sounds of each realization.
For the first piece, chosen by Sanna and based on harpist Rhodri Davies’ Penrhiw, Bertoni, Salis and Sanna seem to have taken texture as their point of departure. Bertoni’s strummed and pizzicato cello, together with the various shaken and scraped percussion sounds from Sanna and Salis, present a free reimagining of some of the effects Davies’ extended playing extracts from the harp. The second composition interpreted is Morton Feldman’s Crippled Symmetry, selected by Salis and featuring Bertoni on prepared piano accompanied by tuned mallet percussion, gong, prepared snare drum and processed voice from Sanna and Salis. In contrast to Feldman’s predominantly understated dynamics, the audio space the three create here is filled with suspenseful, robust sounds. The third and final piece, Solo de Endingidi, Bertoni’s choice, was taken from a recording of Ugandan music. Bertoni’s rapidly bowed cello forms the backbone of the piece, which gets equally energetic support from snare and other percussion.
Listeners seeking literal interpretations of the source compositions won’t find them here, but to paraphrase the ancient dictum, sometimes a hidden harmony is best.
Ana Foutel & Edgardo Palotta: Ritual (2021)
Recorded in Buenos Aires in the first half of this year, Ritual is the second collaboration between pianist/percussionist Ana Foutel and multi-instrumentalist Edgardo Palotta. That the recording was made live with both musicians present wouldn’t under ordinary circumstances be remarkable, but during the time of COVID it represents an almost defiant assertion of the durability of human connections.
That connection is amply demonstrated by the sure-footed acoustic music the two recorded. Foutel and Palotta explore a spectrum of improvisational possibilities ranging from melodic duets to confrontations of abstract sounds. The very first track, for example, introduces the set with Palotta’s stentorian but ultimately mellifluous reedwork, which robustly overlays Foutel’s elegant pianism. By contrast, a track like Acá no nieva moves smoothly from pitch-based to unpitched sounds, with Palotta’s Indian flute providing the pivot. In addition to Indian flute, Palotta plays bass clarinet, clarinet, and pizzicato double bass. On the three tracks featuring the latter instrument, Palotta sets out slowly varying, repeated figures that Foutel picks up on piano and transforms through variations of her own.
Mauro Sambo & Marcello Magliocchi – …camminava solo sotto le stelle (2021)
The two improvisations on …camminava solo sotto le stelle find multi-instrumentalist Mauro Sambo paired with percussionist Marcello Magiolocchi, who also brings a number of instruments to the collaboration. The tracks were recorded a year apart, the first in December 2014 and the second in the following December.
One of the instruments Magliocchi is credited with playing is sounding sculptures by Andrea Dami, which may well provide the opening moves on these two substantial performances. Magliocchi has had prior experience with Dami’s sheet metal and steel sculptures, having recorded the album Music for Sounding Sculptures in Twenty-three Movements some ten years ago, and in fact sounds from Dami’s sculptures appear to be the continuo running throughout both tracks. Sambo’s electronics, bass clarinet, and bowed double bass join Magliocchi to add a layer of largely unpitched sounds to a collective sound that plays subtly with changes of density. In addition to percussion, Magliocchi contributes electric and acoustic guitars and Sambo adds soprano saxophone, further mixing colors in the overall weave of musical texture. Still, the predominant timbres come from the various percussion instruments, which provide both background context and foreground punctuation. What’s striking and strikingly consistent about both pieces is the way Sambo and Magliocchi create a truly cooperative sound, a polyphony of timbres melding into a purposeful unity.
ASA – Avoiding Sharks Attacks (2021)
Recorded in November 2019, Avoiding Sharks Attacks is a compact set of four improvisations by the trio of Luca Pissavini on five-string double bass (played both “clean” and with electronic distortion), Fabrizio Bozzi Fenu on electric guitar, and Emilio Bernè sampling drums on laptop—a surprisingly effective substitute for an organic drum kit in the context of the group’s close interactions. The three play in a style that alludes, often in an oblique way, to harmonic cycles and structured themes but still manages to flow freely with the unfolding logic of the moment, whether frantic, as on the opening track, or more reflective, as in Lose Obedience.
Guillaume Gargaud & Eero Savela – Helsinki (2020)
The thirty-four-minute-long Helsinki Part 1, recorded in what now seems like the antediluvian pre-covid month of February 2020, documents the first time guitarist Guillaume Gargaud of Le Havre, France, and Finnish trumpeter Eero Savala played together. That this was their initial meeting isn’t at all apparent in the music, which develops with a smooth, unbroken progression of ideas that are realized with an unhesitating assurance—not only for the entirety of the lengthy first piece but on the shorter follow-up as well. What both improvisations reveal is a strong lyricism carried along on Savela’s warm, mid-range voice, the unhurried phrasing of which contrasts with the bright, staccato tones of Gargaud’s acoustic guitar. Gargaud supports Savela’s melodies with sympathetic chords and countermelodies that evidence a sophisticated harmonic sense working in real time.
Mauro Sambo & Matilde Sambo – sentieri paralleli (2020)
In contrast to Gargaud and Savela, who hadn’t met before recording Helsinki, it’s safe to say that Mauro Sambo and Matilde Sambo, a father-daughter duo, knew each other before recording sentieri paralleli and in fact they’ve previously collaborated on a recording. Also in contrast to the spartan instrumentation of the Helsinki set, Mauro and Matilde both bring a broad range of instrumental voices to their music. Mauro is represented by electronics, contra-alto clarinet, gong, Tibetan bells and other percussion, cello, zither and kumbus; Matilde is here on electric guitar, electronics and field recordings. Both musicians use these resources with discernment; there’s no overcrowding of textures or overshadowing of individual contributions. Their nearly thirty-eight-minute-long, single-track album begins with an electronic flourish in an echoing space and unfolds as a deliberately paced, ever-changing soundworld that pulls the listener into its nuanced, mist-enshrouded topography. All the more striking then when the mist evaporates and the lone voice of the contra-alto clarinet emerges, or an electric guitar arpeggio, or a clutch of pre-recorded speech.
Marcello Magliocci & Alen Grassi – Trama (2020)
Marcello Magliocchi and Alen Grassi’s Trama comprises two long and one short improvisation. The first of the long tracks foregrounds Magliocci’s crisply recorded percussion. As this and the other tracks demonstrate, Magliocchi is an outstanding color drummer able to draw on a sumptuous palette of metal, wood and membrane. Grassi’s electric guitar, in turn, is the dominant voice on the second long track. Grassi sets up simple harmonic tensions with drones and two-chord patterns, and then dissolves it all into picked-out, muted notes and bent tones.
Johannes Feuchter & Stanislas Pili – über.zeit (2020)
Clarinetist-contrabass clarinetist Johannes Feuchter and percussionist Stanislas Pili’s über.zeit is a five-part improvised suite that begins with the ticking of a mechanical alarm clock and ends when the bell rings. In between, Feuchter and Pili explore sounds ranging from pitchless noise to melodic fragments and drones. Feuchter alternates between the low, reedy buzz of the contrabass clarinet at one end, and the flitterings and trills of the clarinet’s upper registers at the other; in addition, he offers the pre-musical sounds of the plosions and stutterings of breath moving through a wooden tube. Pili covers a comparably broad range running from the rumbling of a bass drum to the shimmering of high-pitched chimes.
Fabrizio Bozzi Fenu – Sant’Andrìa (2020)
There is Fabrizio “Bozzi” Fenu’s Sant’Andrìa, on Plus Timbre [pt099]. Fenu, a guitarist originally from Sardinia now resident in Marseille, France, invents a many-colored sound world for electric guitar augmented by loops, miscellaneous electronic processing, and preparations. In spite of the sometimes abstract nature of the timbres he coaxes from his instrument, he isn’t averse to grounding his improvisations in the occasional steady rhythmic pulse. There’s much of interest here—repeated fragments of melody circling an imaginary center; insistently ringing tones coalescing into chords; microtonal detunings; the reversed decay of notes turned backwards. And beneath it all, the sharply honed edge of the electric guitar’s plain voice.
DuoSerpe – Piovono Santi (2020)
First things first, a full disclosure: Cristiano Bocci, one half of the DuoSerpe, is a frequent collaborator and friend. That having been said — and another personal note here — it’s fascinating to listen to this set of music, which opens up a new window onto Cris’ work with a duet partner playing an acoustic orchestral instrument.
On Piovano Santi Bocci, a multi-instrumentalist from Tuscany, works with live electronics, synthesizers and voice. The other half of DuoSerpe is Paolo Acquaviva, a trombonist with a background in classical and jazz performance, who also is from Tuscany. The collaboration was begun in 2017 under the auspices of the BlueRing Improvisers Association, a collective dedicated to exploring improvised musics, and has developed since then through live appearances at various Italian events dedicated to radical improvised music. The three pieces collected here were recorded in April 2019 at the Octomusic School and Studio in San Quirico D’Orcia in Siena.
As is often the case with Bocci’s collaborative work with acoustic musicians, the electronic component of DuoSerpe’s music is an interactive agent intervening in, and transforming, the acoustic instrument’s lines in real-time. On all three pieces the electronics serve as a compositional tool by means of which Bocci—using loops, delays, live sampling and layering in depth in order to materialize structures through collage, repetition and dynamically changing densities–sculpts improvised sounds and melodies into robust structures with cyclical, timbrally-variegated features. Acquaviva’s refined sound and creative musical ideas are a fine complement to Bocci’s work with sonority and structure—the trombonist’s ability to play well-developed melodies within the constantly mutating electronic environment lends the music a linear continuity even as it undergoes shifts along its rhythmic and textural dimensions. The contrast of the unprocessed, natural sound of the trombone with its electronically enhanced doubles, some of which are traceable to their acoustic source and some of which aren’t, provides one of the set’s recurring timbral motifs. Bocci works similar contrasts using his voice as raw material on the first track, which features his dramatic reading of a text set against an elegiac trombone melody.
This is music successful not only on its own terms as experimentation with sonic qualities and structures, but as something aesthetically pleasing as well.
Marco Olivieri, Antonio Valente & Sanjay Kansa Banik – Rumore d’acqua (2020)
Rumore d’acqua, a three-movement suite for a percussion trio and voices, is named for the last line of a classic haiku by Basho. The poem also provides the text sung during the suite’s third movement, and appropriately so: the apparent simplicity of haiku is reflected in the simplicity of the trio’s makeup—piano, vibes, and table—but as with haiku, the implications of this surface simplicity are complex and subtle.
Rumore d’acqua’s trio is composed of pianist Marco Olivieri, vibist Antonio Valente and tabla player Sanjay Kansa Banik. All three are resident in Italy—Olivieri in Rome, where among other things he is active in the improvisational collective NED; Valente in Milan, where he composes and teaches music therapy in schools; and Banik, who teaches and performs in various ensembles, in Rome by way of Bengal. All three are rigorously trained in their respective musical traditions, which meld nicely in this multi-layered, rhythmically intricate music.
Each movement of the suite begins with a text sung as a canon for three voices, which is then developed in the instrumental improvisations that follow. On the first movement, the piano and vibes pick up from the canon and elaborate and vary the melody until the original modality gradually dissolves into freer harmonies and wider-ranging melodies. The second movement places the tabla under the voices, from which it emerges into a long solo that sets up a propulsive current of sophisticated rhythms. The piano and vibes enter in at about the halfway point and with the tabla weave a lively rhythmic web based on threes. For the third movement, the piano and vibes accompany the voices before settling into a slow, measured rhythm that eventually accelerates to a racing finish.
As important as the piano and vibes are to the suite’s melodic and harmonic development, it really is the tabla, with its constantly mutating rhythmic subdivisions and cross-accents, that gives the ensemble its truly unique and mesmerizing sound.
Gussoni / Magliocchi / Northover – The Sea of Frogs (2019)
The trio of Bruno Gussoni, Marcello Magliocchi and Adrian Northover has the unusual instrumentation of flutes, drums and soprano saxophone (played by Gussoni, Magliocchi and Northover, respectively). The standard flute and soprano sax share a substantial overlap in range, but differ markedly in timbre: one is hollow and airy in the low register and bright in the high register, while the other is penetrating and nasal in the upper register and reedy and dense in the lower register. In combination, they can create startling contrasts of color, as they do here. Whether played together in blocks of sound or as flurries of notes strung together in intertwining lines, the two instruments open up a sometimes very subtle space of difference between them. In their unaccompanied Duo #1, these differences are emphasized through extended techniques such as air notes and key clicks; elsewhere dynamic contrasts come into play, as in the opening piece for trio and in Trio #3’s upper register passages and held tones. Given the frequently delicate balance of sounds surrounding him, Magliocchi responds with sensitivity and open textures, never crowding out the winds. His skill as a colorist is evident throughout, but especially on Duo #2 for drums and soprano sax, and Duo #3 for drums and flute.
Foutel + Palotta – Mandarina (2019)
Foutel + Palotta are Argentinian—pianist Ana Foutel is from Buenos Aires, where Mandarina was recorded, while multi-instrumentalist Edgardo Palotta is from Quilmes. Their six duets are notable for their timbral adventurousness thanks largely to Foutel’s exquisite extended techniques and Palotta’s eclectic battery of wind, string and percussion instruments. On Noctilucas, a dark, ponderously paced piece, for instance, Foutel transforms the piano into a reasonable facsimile of a mallet percussion instrument; on Sándalo she plays directly on the strings with metal objects to give the piano a brittle, harpsichord-like sound. Palotta’s own contributions are always apt, whether underscoring the music with pizzicato double bass as he does on Ocre and Evening, spinning out evocative motifs on clarinet on Noctilucas, or bringing in the sounds of the South American Indian flute on Nos salvaron los peces.
Giuseppe Pascucci & Vito Pesce – Nikola Was Right! & Humasaurs (2019)
Guiseppe Pascucci and Vito Pesce, both of whom play guitar and electronics, are collaborators on these two simultaneously released and complementary albums, both of which were recorded live September 2016-February 2017. Pascucci and Pesce’s individual bios on the label’s site are vague almost to the vanishing point—which in a way is consistent with their music: on both albums they craft a collective sound in which each individual voice blends into an encompassing and satisfying whole.
On Nikola Was Right!—the Nikola in question being Tesla—the group sound is rich: resonant, full-ranged and sensuous. The album’s concise, intelligent soundscapes feature surging and cresting tones, complex harmonies wrapped in washes of sound folding back on itself, and crystalline, echoing chords and single-line runs splayed against electronic chaff and the occasional synthetic choir. Humasaurs, by contrast, is a spikier affair. Where Nikola Was Right! tends to efface the guitarishness of the guitars’ sound, Humasaurs pulls it into the foreground and revels in it. Pascucci and Pesce make each part of the instrument audible with aggressively staccato attacks, insistent rhythms, pointillistic textures and sharper-edged timbres. It’s a different proposition from what we hear on Nikola Was Right! and the perfect counterpart to that album. A fine matched pair.
Mauro Sambo & Matilde Sambo – …sibilava tra i denti… (2018)
…sibilava tra i denti…–“hissed between the teeth”—is the work of two generations of Venetian experimentalists. Multi-instrumentalist Mauro Sambo, here on electronics, double bass, kalimba, gong and other percussion, is joined by his daughter Matilde, who provides field recordings and plays electric guitar and electronics. Both bring sensibilities formed at the crossings of sound and various other media—videography for Matilde, and the plastic arts for Mauro. As might be expected, their collaboration shows a sensitivity to the ways sound can imply and simulate action projected into a three-dimensional space—implication being the soul of their musical wit.
The single, nearly twenty-nine minute track is permeated by an atmosphere of acousmatic mysteriousness, as the sources of Sambos’ sounds seem reluctant to reveal themselves. Until they do, in the form of clearly-shaped guitar arpeggios, a struck gong reverberating in a void, or the skittering of a hyperactive kalimba. Throughout its changes of texture and timbre, the track gives rise to an almost cinematic sense of obscure but purposeful actions performed with the help of unknown means, and all of it taking place just at the threshold of comprehension.
KURUNDU (Zigo & Camila Dos Santos) – Yvykua Ipuva (2018)
Much experimental/electronic sound art can be austere and even severely cerebral; Kurundu’s five-movement suite Yvykua Ipuva, by contrast, revels in the polymorphous sensuality of sound.
Kurundu, named for South American ritual amulets, is a binational duo of Paraguayan cellist Camila Dos Santos and Argentinian electronics artist Zigo Rayopineal. Their collaboration has produced a set of richly atmospheric, layered musical constructions built in real time. Dos Santos and Rayopineal are particularly good at creating the illusion of spatial depth with sound, partly through a close attention to the stratification of texture and partly through the reverberant voices they tend to favor. The foundation is Dos Santos’ cello, suitably looped and processed. Her playing here is more about ambience than melody, although a melodic line does unfold slowly at the heart of the long second movement; her use of chords and drones, glissandi and extended techniques complements Rayopineal’s shimmering electronic settings. The latter dominate the fourth movement, which seems to allude to early electronic music’s sonic imaginings of outer space; the final movement puts the focus on Dos Santos’ cello—strummed, overpressured and bowed for harmonics and multiphonics, it sketches its self-portrait in a concave mirror.
Sadhana – Sadhana (2017)
Sadhana, the Neapolitan trio of Massimo Imperatore on guitar and effects, Umberto Lepore on double bass, objects and bells, and drummer Marco Castaldo, take the jazz guitar trio through both conventional and challenging soundworlds, always following a path of musically impeccable logic.
Both tracks are structured as suites alternating melodic improvisation with abstract sound; the transitions between sections are smooth and make the relationship between melody and noise a reciprocal, mutually inevitable one. The nearly thirty-six minute long opening track starts with pristine, reverberant guitar notes quickly joined by double bass in a unison line. What develops is a vaguely implied, calypso-like harmonic progression seated on top of free-rhythm drumming and a restless bassline that seems on the verge of breaking into a regular walk, but never does. The piece dissolves into unpitched sounds—crisp drumming supplemented by creaking, scraping, the backwards-surge of a volume pedal or control. And then back again to melody, through several cycles. The shorter second track runs this script backward, starting with sound and developing into pitch.
Each of the pieces is notable for its clarity and transparency of texture, even when the music shades off into pure sound. Each individual voice maintains its unmistakable profile—the guitar its clean, round tone; the double bass a muted, pizzicato attack; the drums a firm, supporting presence. A very fine recording all around.
Mauro Sambo – Quel mutamento era il primo di una serie infinita (2017)
A sound collage of understated drama and almost tangible atmosphere, Mauro Sambo’s Quel mutamento era il primo di una serie infinita (“what change was the first in an infinite series”) is a perfectly symmetrical suite made up of twenty parts of two minutes and twenty-three seconds each. Sambo deftly combines and recombines a set of recurring sounds—tolling bells, bits of operatic recordings heard from a distance, hammered metallic sounds reminiscent of a foundry or factory, the low buzz of a bass clarinet—in layers suggesting extension in physical space. The recapitulation of sounds within the suite gives it the feel of an uncannily familiar dream made up of repeating and evolving soft-edged images.
Distante, D’Amico & Forestiere – Aphasia (2016)
Summing up his aesthetic, pianist Jack D’Amico describes his music as ranging across a continuum of song, noise and silence. Aphasia, his trio collaboration with trumpeter Giorgio Distante and drummer Walter Forestiere, does indeed integrate all three elements into a thoughtful amalgamation of avant-garde timbres and cohesive rhythms standing in the shadows of silence. Ironically enough, the release is named for a medical condition involving language impairment—ironically, because the music here demonstrates a fluency in the vocabularies and grammars of different strains of contemporary improvisation.
Distante, D’Amico and Forestiere, all of whom are from Southern Italy–Lecce, Naples and Bari, respectively–share eclectic backgrounds. With roots in classical, jazz and contemporary idioms, their work has leveraged improvisation and the use of new technologies to enhance sounds both individually and in the aggregate. So it’s no surprise that Aphasia’s four tracks move between electric and acoustic contexts with a transparency that reconciles these two often distinctive milieux.
The opening and closing tracks both center on a sound that recreates, while simultaneously refreshing, the electric piano vamps and steady grooves of early jazz-rock. Aloof’s minor key vamp falls into a beat accented in sevens, while being punctuated by the stab and fade of D’Amico’s chording and Distante’s spare melodies. Aphasia plays a spacious, shimmering electric piano and ruminative trumpet off against the album’s most assertive drumming. The two middle tracks, Regret That and Micro-Macro, work together like a suite, Regret That’s closing drum-trumpet duet leading naturally into Micro-Macro’s opening with an introspective cadenza for trumpet alone. The former piece is built around D’Amico’s classical-modernist pianism, the scraping of the strings inside the piano offset by Forestiere’s well-placed, discreet drumming, which eventually brings the piece into the solid structure of a deliberate 4-4 time. The latter piece sums up the various elements making up the album: Pensive solos for trumpet and piano in which individual tones are given room to breathe; surprising timbres for drums and objects; and the trio’s collective coalescence into a sturdy rhythm.
Mauro Sambo, Marco Colonna & Ivano Nardi – …non così lontano dal cuore (2016)
“…non così lontano dal cuore”—not so far from the heart—is a long, uncluttered and atmospheric improvisation from the trio of Mauro Sambo (electronics, electric guitar, piano, shakuhachi and double bass), Marco Colonna (alto clarinet) and Ivano Nardi (percussion). Over the course of the forty-one minute-long piece Colonna supplies lithe, serpentine melodies that frequently echo or counterpoint themselves thanks to Sambo’s looping and electronic manipulation. The interplay between the two musicians largely centers on the timbral contrasts and overlaps of distorted electric guitar and thunderously resonant piano chords on the one side and the now rounded, now overblown and raw-edged sounds of the clarinet on the other. A high point is a brief duet for the buzzing, sustained notes of the reed instrument and the shakuhachi’s skittishly voice-like melodies. Throughout, Nardi provides sympathetic and sensitive support on percussion.
Pellerin, Boss & Magliocchi – The Sounding Door (2015)
The twelve relatively brief pieces making up The Sounding Door, a trio work by Guy-Frank Pellerin, Matthias Boss and Marcello Magliocchi, represent a variety of inspired chamber improvisation grounded in the textural multiplicity afforded by similarly pitched but timbrally different instruments.
Although each participant is a multi-instrumentalist—Pellerin plays three different types of saxophone as well as bone flute and clarinet; Boss contributes violin, flute, and voice; and Magliocchi plays guitar, percussion and a sound-producing sculpture created by M. Andrea Dami—the tracks are never crowded but instead leave space for each individual instrument to develop its voice in tandem with the others.
Most of the pieces focus on the interplay of Pellerin’s reeds and flute with Boss’s violin. The juxtaposition of the violin with the soprano and sopranino saxophones creates a musical tension built on the simultaneous convergence of pitches and divergence of timbre, which often serve to emphasize the brightness of the violin. By contrast, the track Incertitude Rêvée puts the violin against the clarinet’s lower register, the latter taking on the unlikely function of a pseudo-cello in an updated continuo. Un Bicchiere di Spumante features plucked violin and baritone saxophone against a shimmering background of cymbals and other metallic percussion—quite possibly a case of the sculpture audibly asserting itself in the mix.
José Guillén – Órbitas (2015)
An orbit entails a fine balance between two objects—one trying to pull in another that in turn is trying to escape that pull with forward motion. Through the tension between these invisible opposing forces an equilibrium is struck.
The play of invisible forces between two orbiting bodies provides the conceptual background for José Guillén’s Órbitas, a concise collection of six electronic pieces. Each composition is made of a base recording to which a second track is improvised and overlaid. The layered drones, chords and tones approach and recede from each other, seemingly moving in and out of proximity; this, combined with the rising and falling dynamics, evokes changes in an orbiting body’s altitude. Guillén’s choices of sounds and textures reflect the workings of a subtle sensibility.
André Darius & Paul Mimlitsch – Renga (2015)
Renga is a form of linked, short verse written by two or more poets together. André Darius and Paul Mimlitsch creatively interpret the idea of the collaborative series of brief pieces with their duo release titled, appropriately enough, Renga. The fourteen short tracks—each averaging about two minutes in length—are improvisational miniatures for Mimlitsch’s bass clarinet and contrabass clarinet and Darius’ electric upright bass and voice. The music is largely a kind of constantly moving, engagingly free lyricism with frequent excursions into pure sound and timbre, particularly on the tracks featuring Darius’ vocalizations. Mimlitsch’s reedy low register growls and ruminations contrast nicely with the brighter sounding yet similarly low-pitched electric upright bass.
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