“Severity rules on this French collection of layered improvisations for rotating surfaces and straight horns”
Severity rules on this French collection of layered improvisations for rotating surfaces and straight horns. While Pascal Battus sets any number of items atop his liberated Walkman motors, the sounds he obtains from them don’t change drastically from moment to moment. Michel Doneda on soprano and sopranino saxophones matches his counterpart’s attack by playing multiphonic stabs of varying lenghts, so that the music often feels like an exposition of two streams of drawn out sounds running nearly parallel to each other. And yet there’s plenty of productive friction in their juxtapositions of elongated and stuttering textures, especially when the distances between their raw pitches gradually narrow, until a collision suddenly seems inevitable, but never actually occurs.
Originally published by The Wire.