As a renowned flutist with a chameleonic palette, Robert Dick's idiosyncratic playing includes a patented device that enhances the instrument's potential for glissando expressiveness (by no means a given, with flute). Nicola L. Hein's sound artistry encompasses the attributes of a philosopher/scientist whose cynical guitar approach projects any degree of magnitude between "bitingly noisy" and "sinisterly convulsive", concealing swarms of reverberant signifiers under a wide range of unsentimental motions. An explosive combination, according to the old cliché. Yet absolutely nothing is evoking commonplace on Structures Of Unreason.
Then again, genuine pathfinders don't settle for obvious appearances and comfortable presumptions. They persist in walking, surveying, picking, pondering. Most crucially, they ruthlessly tweak what seems unusable. These four tracks display an outright rebellion against being pegged in any way, or merely positioned inside a set of silly definitions. Even when listening to them intently, the brain struggles to seize just a risible fraction of the tremendous wealth of acoustic and dynamic information conveyed.
Above all, what's revealed is the awareness of the performers with respect to what surrounds them, the vibration of aliveness in its less detectable components. It's aural transfiguration at a molecular level. Dick and Hein become conduits through which energy masses of variable intensity can be transferred. The recipients should adjust their internal knobs to be a functional part of the process: appropriately decoding that resonance, observing that liquefaction of logic until it's turned into coherent audio painting.
This work's merits are furtherly confirmed by its "reproductive pliability." By carrying out tests — as this reviewer's used to doing in the presence of valuable records — you'll find out that the music still preserves its fundamental assets when listened to at lower volume. In other words, the substance of an instantaneous universe remains, even without pinpointing specific constituents (which, in improvisation, leads straight to intellectual quicksand). Within what could appear unfriendly at first hearing, spaces open up that disclose the precious multifunctionality of unorthodox timbres. The instrumentalists are never to be overlooked, though, however willingly they place themselves in the role of egoless mediums. In fact, it's thanks to them that we manage to decontaminate our auditory compartments from the germs of praxis.
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