Face à Face is a set of twelve duo improvisations by the American bassist Barre Phillips and György Kurtág jr., the electronics player and son of the Hungarian composer György Kurtág. It arrived four years after End to End, the 2018 album Phillips presented as his last solo recording, and finds him still searching, this time in dialogue. Acoustic double bass and live electronics meet here as equals, in short pieces made in the moment and gathered into an album of about 33 minutes.
Phillips was born in San Francisco, lived in France for more than fifty years, and made his first ECM album, Music from Two Basses, with Dave Holland in 1971. Kurtág jr. left Hungary for France in the early 1980s and worked as a researcher at IRCAM in Paris. ECM dates the duo's work together back to 2014. On this album Kurtág plays Yamaha DX7 IIFD, Korg T3 and Roland JD 800 synthesizers, with Roland Handsonic digital percussion. The music was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines in 2020, then mixed there by Gérard de Haro, the two musicians and producer Manfred Eicher.
Kurtág describes his part as architectural: "I build rooms of both time and space around him," he says, and elsewhere, "I create a shadow." In the opening Beyond he sets up oscillating seconds and repeated pitches, and Phillips answers with a melodic line and bent double stops. The Under Zone starts from a dense jumble of electronic sounds that thins into fading held tones, cut by single strong notes from the bass and by tones close to a vibraphone. In Extended Circumstances bowed bass runs against vibrating electronics that recall crickets. Across the album Phillips moves between arco, pizzicato, slapping and percussive knocking on the instrument, and nothing settles into a steady pulse.
Critics heard the album as a meeting of two very different practices. In Stereophile Jason Victor Serinus wrote that "it's music that transmits exquisite silence, infinite space, extreme timbral contrasts, and poetic magnanimity through small gestures." Michael Ullman of The Arts Fuse noted in 2022 that nothing on it swings, yet called these "beautifully recorded improvisations" "never less than intriguing." The German magazine Audio made it its jazz CD of the month, and Christian Carey listed it among the Sequenza21 favourites of 2022.
CD edition, ECM 2735, released in August 2022, with liner notes by Steve Lake and cover art by Fidel Sclavo.
