Four tracks culled from performances in 2008 and 2010 from this intriguing trio consisting of piano (Agnel), piano frame and electronics (Neumann) and alto and soprano saxophones (Gauguet). The opening track is pensive, Agnel tolling single low notes, Gauguet softly sputtering and hissing, Neumann eliciting impenetrable hums and clicks, the whole a slow tide drifting past, encountering obstructions, eddying past them, aware of its surroundings but relentlessly oozing forward. Eventual a more substantial block is encountered, perhaps a drying out of the riverbed, and things become increasingly parched, harsh and active, splintering into a series of scrapes and squalls; an effective and unsettling voyage.
The second cut dispenses with any gentle flow, instead offering a bristling package, spiraling out, if you will, from the latter stages of the previous work, all air-infused rasps, distant, echoing chimes and warped stroked strings. It surges, overwhelms, crumbles into a clattering heap, regroups, evanesces again, seeking out different spaces, all of them discomfiting but true. Another heady, rough work, finely limned. A third piece subsides into delicious quiet, the scrapes softened, the whines ameliorated. The disc concludes with a brief but deliciously crunchy amalgam of repeated, muted piano tones and spittled saxophone forming a very rich mixture, one that could have gone on for far longer than its five minutes.
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