Dave Tucker, Pierpaolo Martino

 Melophobia ignites with crackling friction, the kind only found when two artists refuse either to compromise or disengage. Dave Tucker comes from a lineage of guitar-driven experimentation - his attack is sharp, percussive, and never satisfied with the familiar. Instead, each phrase teeters between groove, ferocity and collapse, challenging the space and tempo with every new entry. Pierpaolo Martino counters the guitar’s angular drive with a double bass that sings and snags, bouncing from near-classical sonority to bitter-edged growl, and then sliding into a region where electronics claim the lead. Their interplay is unpredictable - electronic treatments dart in and out, not as window dressing, but as a third participant, sometimes knotting the texture into glitches and shadows, sometimes dissolving into atmospheric residue. What pervades Melophobia is a sense of restless search - tension and release are not endpoints but currencies, exchanged in ritual bouts and brief, almost accidental consonances. The music feels alive, not in spite of its dissonance and contradiction, but because of them. This is improvisation at its most kinetic: every sound, a distant cousin to the blues, fractured and rebuilt in the instant - a document of risk, rigor, and the wild hope that chaos will yield, however briefly, to new logic.