Matt Davis, Matt Milton & Bechir Saade – ‘Dun’


‘Dun’
Matt Davis (trumpet & field recordings)
Matt Milton (violin)
Bechir Saade (bass clarinet & flute)
Another Timbre, at12


This is a beautiful disc of improvised music. Two of the trio had played on one of my favourite improv discs from last year (‘Hum’ on the same label), and my expectations were so high that initially I was a little disappointed with ‘Dun’. ‘Hum’ offered a view through a microscope of an extraordinary insect-like world teeming with small sounds and movements, a busy music of tiny gestures that were constantly being readjusted as each new breath or tone changed the microcosmic balance of forces. It was riveting, inspiring music that you couldn’t leave for one second.

I suppose I was hoping for a repeat dose with ‘Dun’, as Matt Davis and Bechir Saade appear here again, though this time with the violinist Matt Milton (of whom I’d not heard). In fact from the start this is a very different soundworld. If ‘Hum’ presented a world viewed through a microscope, ‘Dun’ is a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope. It is a music that meanders in a gentle, lazy way through a wide open valley. And once you’ve adapted to the dramatic change in pace and perspective, it offers a sumptuously enjoyable journey.

There are three pieces, entitled simply ‘1’, ‘2’ & ‘3’, the first and longest of which is perhaps the least immediately appealing. But it is this piece that really clears the way and sets the tone for the unique music of this trio. Save for the occasional unpredictable blast from the trumpet or bass clarinet, everything ranges from piano to ppp. The violin especially is sometimes barely audible, and yet Matt Milton’s ultra-quiet scrapings and scratchings are the cornerstone that underpins all that goes on here. Frequently the others will fall silent and it is the violin that keeps the music pushing gently forward, like water in a shallow stream edging past banks of mud or stone. Saade’s gurgling breathy clarinet and Davis’ sustained distorted trumpet tones weave mesmeric patterns in and out and around the violin.

There are moments of relatively conventional beauty – the long bass clarinet tones at the start of ‘2’, and the lovely interplay between trumpet and clarinet near the end of ‘3’ – but there are also passages whose beauty creeps up on you in quite unexpected ways, as in the extraordinary extended ending to ‘2’ which creates a quiet, leisurely climax out of small clicks and twitters.

Having listened to the disc over 20 times now, I have not only adapted to the change in pace from ‘Hum’, but I am repeatedly astonished by how perfectly structured this music appears to be. Given that it was improvised without prior discussion and is presented without any edits in post-production, the balance of each moment, and of the total structure created by the sequence of all the moments, is breathtaking. Everything feels just ‘right’ and in the right place. It is a remarkably mature work by three musicians so young.

Matt Davis – the most established and well-known of the trio - has featured on a string of cd’s of consistently high quality, my favourites being ‘Hum’ (with Rhodri Davies, Bechir Saade & Samantha Rebello), ‘Done’ (with Rhodri Davies & Mark Wastell), and his duo with Graham Halliwell (‘Old School House’). ‘Dun’ slides seamlessly into this series. Again he here uses field recordings to complement the acoustic instruments in his characteristically quiet and subtle way. Bechir Saade is a relative newcomer whose year-long stay in London resulted in three excellent discs (‘Dun’, ‘Hum’ and ‘An Account of My Hut’ – an album of improvised duos with Clive Bell for shakuhachi and ney). His playing has a lovely breathy tone and it’s a loss to the London scene that he has now returned to the Lebanon (though doubtless a huge boost to the emerging scene there). As I said above, I hadn’t heard of Matt Milton, but he is just one of a group of young improvisers who have developed out of the workshops run since 1999 by AMM drummer Eddie Prevost (workshops which Saade also attended while in London). ‘Dun’ suggests that this group of young players may play a crucial role in maintaining, revitalising and extending the art of improvised music within Britain.

Overall this is improvisation of the highest quality, a music that has learned from ‘eai’ (electro-acoustic improvisation) and the ‘New London Silence’, but which is not content to rest on its laurels. It is a music that is moving quietly forward in a unshowy but compelling way, taking us to into new and as yet unheard soundworlds. Wonderful.

Mark Andre - durch, zu, in & alsII

Mark Andre
‘durch’ (2004-5) for saxophone, percussion & piano
‘…zu…’ (2004) for string trio
‘…in’ (2002) for bass clarinet
‘…als…II’ (2001) for bass clarinet, cello & piano with live electronics
Kairos 0012732KAI

Mark Andre is a relatively little-known composer, French by birth but living in Germany, whose music combines very effectively influences from his two major teachers: Gérard Grisey and Helmut Lachenmann. From Grisey there is a deep exploration of the spectral aspect of sounds, and from Lachenmann the radical re-working of the instruments themselves in a “musique concrete instrumentale”.

The majority of Andre’s works are scored for the same few instruments, all of which he has studied in depth from an acoustic and scientific point of view: bass clarinet, piano, cello, cymbalon & some percussion. That these instruments are played in unconventional ways is partly the influence of Lachenmann, but is primarily to an extraordinary interest in the possibilities of physical sound. Andre’s scores are daunting in that in addition to the parameters of pitch and duration, he specifies in detail (and develops systems of notation for) factors such as position of the bow, pressure of the bow or hand on fingerboard etc. Moreover he works very precisely with microintervals, and requests of the wind players, for example, that they should be able to sob into the mouthpiece with various specific degrees of intensity.

Fortunately on this disc his works are played by some of the finest interpreters of contemporary music – the ensemble recherche and the Trio Accanto, all of whom make the music appear only ordinarily difficult to perform.

‘durch’ starts with single punched notes from saxophone, drum and piano. Those who know Andre’s earlier works (such as Un-Fini & Ab II) will not be surprised that there is plenty of use of the piano’s body and strings, but in the first half at least there are also little runs on the keyboard, but – characteristically – these short bursts quickly become blocked or die away, and the music soon returns to single notes punctuating silence. As the percussionist moves onto metal percussion, the underlying silence is replaced by an underlying ringing or resonance of bowed cymbals, gongs and tam-tam. The soprano sax starts to play longer tones, and the music settles into a rather beautiful balance between high and low pitches, short and sustained notes and loud and quiet tones. Then suddenly in the last few minutes of the piece its character changes again. The sustained percussion sounds die away, the pianist abandons the keys to make sad squeaky sounds rubbing glass on the piano strings and the saxophonist plays predominantly long tones that increasingly fade off into silence. Then this decays further into indistinct pianissimo scraping sounds, making a very forlorn but extraordinary and beautiful conclusion to a fascinating piece.

‘…zu…’ also starts from silence, with very soft sustained glissandi from the string trio. But from about a minute in these ethereal bowed tones are interrupted by harsh grating sounds as the bow pressure is suddenly increased. The whole has a fractured feel not dissimilar to Lachenmann’s Gran Torso (his first string quartet in which not a single note is played conventionally), though with a more fragile underbelly. Rather surprisingly the title – a very truncated biblical quotation, as all the titles are - refers to paradise (‘von Ewigkeit zu Ewigkeit’, ‘for ever and ever’). But for me the damaged, threatened mood of the piece, though extremely powerful, has nothing paradisial about it.

‘…in’ has been issued before as part of the ‘Witten In Nomine Broken Consort Book’, an occasion from the Witten Festival for New Chamber Music when about 40 composers submitted short pieces which took as their starting-point a short fragment by the Renaissance composer John Tavener. This is a new recording, again by the brilliant clarinettist Shizuyo Oka, and it’s interesting to hear it away from its original context, but in the company of three other compositions by Andre. It very much fits the pattern of his current work. The clarinet is subjected to a challenging workout with countless extended techniques, but all at a slow pace with the emphasis predominantly on sustained notes. The clarinet is positioned next to an open piano, whose strings resonate and gently transform the notes’ decay. The whole is played against and ultimately merges into an underlying silence. Very lovely restrained music.

Finally ‘…als II…’ which starts with ominous low thumps and rumbles from the piano, whose bass strings have been prepared / deadened with plasticine. The biblical quotation this time is from The Book of Revelations (“And when the lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.”) Again for me the quotation and the feel of the piece are very different. Rather than a heavenly silence, ‘…als II…’ again evokes a rather threatening landscape in which the muffled thuds of the piano combine with breathy sounds and multiphonics on the clarinet and a low scraping in a very limited pitch-range from the cello. It is beautiful enthralling music, but hardly heavenly. The live electronics are used lightly to amplify and project the low volumes around (and above) the audience, who form a circle outside of which the performers play in a triangular formation. I have not seen the work performed, but it must be quite an experience. Whilst clearly the three instruments are combined very carefully, it also appears that each player works independently, absorbed in the construction or exploration of their own restricted soundworld. And the amplification of the sounds must feel like the projection of an internal, almost private space. Again the music undergoes an extraordinary collapse in the final few minutes into a realm of indistinct soft sounds, suggesting another shadow world lying tantalisingly just beyond the boundaries of that strange one that the rest of the piece has so effectively created.

All in all a beautiful disc, both confirming Mark Andre as one of the leading composers of his generation, and suggesting that his work is still developing in fascinating ways. Perhaps his next works will take us further into that quiet fractured space that the endings of three of these pieces evoke.

Rebecca Saunders: 'Stirrings Still'

Rebecca Saunders: ‘Stirrings Still’
blaauw for solo double-bell trumpet (2004)
Blue and Gray for two double basses (2005)
Duo for violin & piano (1999)
vermilion for clarinet, electric guitar & cello (2003)
Stirrings Still for flute, oboe, clarinet, piano & crotales (2006)
musikFabrik
WERGO (WER6694 2)


Music composed for acoustic instruments that centres on the exploration of timbre is relatively rare. The western system for writing down music privileges melody and rhythm, and in much classical music the composer gives little indication of any interest in the possibilities of different timbres beyond the occasional use of mutes or pizzicato. Even for a composer as radical as Webern variation of timbre was limited to choice of instrument, and all the instruments were sounded in the conventional way. But in the second half of the twentieth century some composers and instrumentalists began to develop ‘extended techniques’ whereby instruments were played in unconventional ways, opening up a whole range of sounds different from those for which the instrument was originally designed. Cage’s prepared piano is a famous example, or bowing ‘col legno’, i.e. with the wood rather than the hairs of the bow. It soon became apparent than any musical instrument was capable of playing a given note in several different ways, producing many different qualities of sound. Some of these sounds were difficult to control, or were pitch-variable, but nonetheless awareness of the variety of sounds that were available from acoustic instruments expanded hugely and they seemed to rival the infinity of possible sounds that were being developed over the same period by composers drawn to electronic music.

Giacinto Scelsi, Helmut Lachenmann, Salvatore Sciarrino and Julio Estrada are examples of composers who have developed music for acoustic instruments in which timbre is at least as important as pitch/melody or rhythm. The practical difficulties of notating such music in the western system are daunting. The score of Lachenamnn’s first string quartet (Gran Torso), in which not a single note is played conventionally, is a bewildering maze of notes and special instructions as to exactly how each note should be played. The laboriousness of this process, together with the difficulty in really controlling the outcome, has driven other composers interested in developing new timbres towards the use of electronics (Nono, Xenakis, Luc Ferrari), or towards an increasing engagement with improvisation where the musicians can respond to and work with the inherently unstable nature of many of these unorthodox / extended sounds (David Tudor, Richard Barrett, Hugh Davies).

But there is undoubtedly still a space for composed acoustic music that radically explores new timbres, and the music of Berlin-based composer Rebecca Saunders is one of the strongest examples of this. She has spoken of wanting to continue the “emancipation of timbre” from the confines of the western classical tradition that was begun by the avant garde of the twentieth century. She has been quietly building a reputation for herself as one of the leading voices in contemporary music, but until recently there has only been one CD of her music available: Quartet, which the German label Kairos released in 2001. However this month sees the appearance of two new portrait discs – Stirrings Still on Wergo and Crimson on Kairos – and a third disc (Chroma on Aeon) is due out next month. I have so far only heard Stirrings Still, but it is a stunningly good CD.

Saunders’ compositions start from the exploration of particular sounds: “Each piece is based on specific sounds, whose physical presence provide the core from which a composition can develop… Where possible I work closely with musicians to keep close to the physical reality of the instruments’ core sounds.” The process is slow and in some ways resembles that of a visual artist more than a composer: “Each work requires a thorough investigation of the palettes of sound available in each specific instrumentation and how they can be fused together and worked against each other, i.e. I find myself starting very much at ‘the beginning’ each time, scraping together tiny moments of colour and gesture before the actual composing process can take place.” Once she has identified a number of sounds that she wants to use, Saunders writes them up and literally sticks them to the walls of the studio where she works to think about how they might be combined or assembled into a composition: “I place this completed material on the walls of my studio. The graphic sketches immediately become a single picture that I can view as a whole. These then are my textures and sound surfaces, which I gradually juxtapose. Here begins the ‘composing’.”

Stirrings Still focuses on Saunders’ recent chamber music, an area in which she feels particularly at home given her careful attention to the acoustic possibilities of individual instruments: “Writing chamber music comes far more naturally to me, probably because I need to work closely with these individual sounds, and to engage with the physicality of the instrument.” Her first disc (Quartet on Kairos, which I enjoyed enormously) was striking both for the boldness of the timbres it used and for its abrasive Lachenmann-like energy. Stirrings Still at first glance has a more classical sound and a more contemplative feel. An underlying lyricism, that certainly existed on the earlier CD but was very severely suppressed, here hangs closer to the surface, particularly in the string parts on Duo and Blue and Gray (perhaps it is significant that Saunders herself initially trained as a classical violinist). However on closer listening it is no less radical than Quartet, and in some ways it is even stronger.

The first piece blaauw is a solo for double-bell trumpet, composed with and for Marco Blaauw, the trumpeter with musikFabrik. Doubtless the title is also intended to suggest the homonym ‘blau’ – ‘blue’ in German - as many of Saunders’ titles refer to various hues of blue and red (I can’t claim to understand these references to colour beyond knowing that it isn’t a simple synaesthesia). Though I’m sure that it’s not at all easy to play, blaauw completely eschews any showy virtuosity. The focus is on the individual sounds, often complex and ‘extended’ both in the sense of being timbrally unorthodox and also held until they fade away into silence. This gives the piece a melancholic edge, which is reinforced by further prolonging some of the notes through the use of an open piano whose sustain pedal is pressed to allow the strings to vibrate sympathetically (as well as providing a further transformation of the sound texture). The double-bell trumpet has an extra valve so that the sound can switch between the two bells (or indeed hover in both if the valve is only partially opened). If the bells are prepared or muted differently, then the basic note can be moved between two different kinds of articulation. So in parts of the piece a subtle polyphony emerges as the sound is shifted (and transformed) from bell to bell. Saunders has obviously collaborated at length and to good effect with Marco Blaauw, but I’d be fascinated to know if she is also aware of the work of improvising trumpet players such as fellow-Berliner Axel Dörner or Franz Hautzinger. Much of their playing is more breathy than blaauw, but there are lovely touches of extreme Dörner-ish breathing here too. In sum a gorgeous forlorn piece that quietly covers an extraordinary range of different timbres.

Blue and Gray for two double basses takes its title from a Rothko painting, and plunges us at once into a deep, dark soundworld where the bass’s lowest string predominates. There are moments of relief when one or other instrument offers high almost lyrical tones from the upper strings, but this fragile lyricism is always under threat of being extinguished by the darker tones. It is a powerful, raw and elemental sound, perhaps with less variation than most of the other pieces on the disc, but nonetheless compelling. Apparently the foreword to the score quotes Kandinsky as saying “gray is resonance, and inconsolable motionlessness” and Derek Jarman’s “blue is darkness made visible”. In turn Blue and Gray could be described as ‘darkness made audible’, a rough and thrilling journey through the shadowlands.

Duo for violin and piano is at first sight something apart. It is an older composition, dating from 1999, and in some ways leads back to the pieces on the Quartet disc (which were composed between 1996 and 1998). Where Blue and Gray flowed onwards (albeit dangerously), Duo proceeds in fits and starts, with numerous abrupt changes of direction. The opening violin sounds have a conventional lyricism, but this is immediately disrupted by a loud knock on the body of the piano. For a while the violin keeps trying to bring the music back to a classical notion of beauty, but the piano – though seemingly supportive for snatches – has another agenda. Michael Struck-Schloen’s sleevenotes compare Saunders’ compositions to dramatic presentations, and this is certainly the case with Duo. But it is a macabre drama of the absurd, with the two characters / instruments tussling with one another, sometimes co-operating but then falling out and ignoring each other, or winding each other up. It is a world over which the characters have little control, subject to sudden bursts of violence and unpredictable twists and swings of mood. About four minutes into the piece the piano starts playing a pretty but mechanised motif, sounding like a fragment of melody from a music box. This is a familiar terrain for Saunders who has used music boxes in previous works, and whose earlier pieces often featured fragments of material as though from another world. Saunders has spoken of these as “dreamlike and very absent….Suddenly an entirely different, foreign reality comes to the fore. Our perception of such different realities is generally very limited – music, however, can bring them to light.” The effect is powerful, if also rather chilling. So the piece zigzags on in absorbing and unpredictable ways until after a particularly animated exchange the lid of the piano is slammed shut. What follows for the final two minutes is a beautiful Feldmanesque sequence with the violin weaving around some pretty, repetitive patterns of the piano. This is a piece that demands the listener’s full attention, but it is a stunning listen.

vermilion for clarinet, electric guitar and cello is the longest piece on the disc, and in some ways the most substantial. Its 15 minutes are a constantly shifting play of forces between sound and silence. But the silence that Saunders addresses is a very particular one. It is certainly not the deep soothing silence of the ultra-minimalists (Radu Malfatti, Antoine Beuger, Taku Sugimoto etc.) nor is it Cage’s conceptual point-zero; it is a busy, formative silence, shot through with tensions and shadows. Saunders has written “What we call silence is for me comparable to a dense knot of noise, frequencies and sounds. From this surface of apparent silence I try to draw out and mould sound and colour. I have explored this phenomenon of silence often, but never so precisely as in vermilion. How does silence sound, what are its inner qualities, what are its weight and body, how does it relate to past and future sounds, how does it frame musical gestures, what function does it have between stasis and passion? These questions were foremost in my mind.” Thus although the piece shifts constantly between sound and silence, it would be useless as a new age aid to meditation. The music is stressed, and the sounds when they come are often jarring, unnerving and explosive. So the silence they fall back to is edgy, dangerous and anxious. The electric guitar especially produces a series of unworldly and quite harrowing sounds, and the clarinet and cello, even when they do occasionally strive for some kind of conventional beauty, are always riddled with and undermined by a nervous tension. Listening to vermilion is both riveting and exhausting. Like all of the pieces on the disc it has little evident logical or narrative structure; indeed it has little linear development at all. It is a music that is constantly in the present moment, and is always struggling – and only just managing - to keep its balance. Yet at the end it somehow makes perfect sense. Magical.

The title of the final eponymous work Stirrings Still is taken from Beckett’s last prose text, and the feel of the piece is imbued with a sense of impending closure that is beautifully expressed in the final words of Beckett’s text: “Such and much more such the hubbub in his mind so-called till nothing left from deep within but only ever fainter oh to end. Oh all to end.” According to the sleevenotes “It is a final, radical document of increasing stammering and silence. Never before has Saunders composed such fragile sounds, which, like Beckett’s reduced language, only just penetrate the silence and darkness… musical ‘developments’ in the conventional sense will be missed utterly unless one gives in entirely to the subtle nuances of the movements of sound in space.” It is a breathtakingly beautiful piece, operating in the same kind of area as Cage’s late ‘Number Pieces’, Jakob Ullmann’s recent music, or some of the quieter of today’s best improvisers (John Tilbury, Angharad Davies, Graham Halliwell). At only 11 minutes it also has brevity working for it; the music is shorn of all ornament and pared down to such a degree that the old cliché about every note being made to count really does apply. It is reminiscent of Cage’s Number Pieces also in having no overall score. Each player is given a stopwatch and is instructed to start playing after a certain length of time has elapsed and then play in an approximate tempo but without rigidity. So the clarinet opens the piece on its own, the flute and oboe follow soon after, the crotales (antique cymbals which are bowed) begin after three minutes, and finally the piano after four. The shimmering, hovering quality of the music is largely due to the timbral explorations that Saunders conducted with the musikFabrik windplayers during the process of composition. “Specific, difficult-to-play dyads and double harmonics create an unreal, immaterial aura that is reinforced by interference in the distances between the microintervals… It is a music that seems to be inside and outside at once – both mobile sound sculpture and a journey beneath the surface of the sound waves, into the interior of a sound that suddenly seems more distant yet more intense.” (Michael Struck-Schloen) Yet descriptive words will always fail us. As Rebecca Saunders herself says: “Any attempt to pin down the essence of a piece of music inevitably fails. It is the ‘unnameable’ in music I find so satisfying.”

This disc contains five pieces, each of which is exquisite in itself, but is markedly different in feel from any of the others. At one level it is hard to believe that they were all composed by the same hand, but at the same time as a disc it has a wonderful coherence. It is a brilliant exploration of the timbral possibilities of acoustic instruments, and by some way the best CD of contemporary classical music that I have heard this year.

'Cesura' (Creative Sources, 2003)

‘Cesura’
Ernesto Rodrigues (viola)
Guilherme Rodrigues (cello & pocket trumpet)
Alfredo Costa Monteiro (accordion)
Margarida Garcia (electric double bass)
[creative sources, 2003, cs008cd]

This is an extremely strong and creative disc of improvised music. It is not new, in fact it was recorded almost exactly five years ago to the day, but I want to write about it because although it got several favourable reviews when it was released, I feel that it has since been largely overlooked and forgotten. This forgetting is partly due to the fact that all four musicians have been pretty prolific since then and between them have released dozens of newer discs. Cesura was released on Portuguese violist Ernesto Rodrigues’ own Creative Sources label, and that too is part of the problem. Ernesto and his cellist son Guilherme are both excellent musicians, but tend to get overlooked because virtually all their music is self-published on their own label.

Cesura was the eighth CD on Creative Sources which had started up two years earlier in 2001, but in the five years since then the label has developed a massive catalogue, running now to over 130 discs. 120 new discs in five years means one a fortnight, so even if you had the money to buy them all, it would be virtually impossible to keep up. And there are scores of other labels releasing improvised music – none perhaps quite so frequently as Creative Sources – but altogether it means that there is a huge glut of material out there. These days it is so easy and inexpensive to issue a disc that, compared to the early days of improvised music when LP’s came in drips, this corner of new music is now flooded with wave on wave of releases. And this at a time when CD sales are falling dramatically. It doesn’t make any economic sense. But then it never did, because CD’s and labels featuring improvised music are labours of love rather than economically balanced entities, and people are prepared to lose significant amounts of money in order to get their music published. Inevitably though, with so many improv discs around the quality is very variable, and sadly this means that some excellent music gets lost amidst the chaff and receives little or no attention. And some of those that are noticed are then quickly forgotten with the next flurry of releases. Such is, I think, the case with Cesura.

In the brief sleevenotes Rui Eduardo Paes tells us that the Portuguese word ‘cesura’ refers both to the act of cutting and to the scar caused by that act. He writes that “this music is cut with a flick knife over the surface of silence.” Ironically the album was produced at a time when there was something of a rift cutting through the world of improvised music, and much of the argument was around the notion of silence. Across the world groups of new and (generally) younger players had begun to produce a different music to that of the established generation of improvisers who had largely come out of the free jazz world of the 60’s and 70’s. For a while things became quite polarised; some people felt that they had to take sides and some relationships (musical and social) came to an acrimonious end. Putting it ridiculously crudely, the ‘old’ style which had valued instrumental virtuosity above all was dubbed European Free Improvisation (EFI), while the new lower-case style was ‘electro-acoustic improvisation’ (eai) in which silence (or at least an attention to small sounds) and the use of electronics were what set the pulses racing. So in England Evan Parker’s lightning quick polyphonic playing in his trio with Barry Guy and Paul Lytton was considered archetypal EFI, while the quiet explorations of the IST trio (Simon Fell, Rhodri Davies and Mark Wastell) were pure eai. And in Germany anything with old heroes Peter Brötzmann and Paul Lovens was EFI, while anything with Burkhard Beins or Axel Dörner was eai.

In reality of course a lot of musicians – including some of those mentioned above - moved (and still move) quite happily between these two polarised stereotypes, and a lot of music was (and is) produced which doesn’t fit neatly into either camp. But the fact remains that from about 1998 new styles of improvising were emerging and an album like Cesura is very much a product of those shifts in emphasis.

There are four tracks, the first three between 6 and 9 minutes long, and the last significantly longer at 21:31. But listening to the album it is very difficult to hear clear divisions (caesurae) between one piece and the next, especially because the silences between tracks are so brief. There are no dramatic climaxes or finales or resolutions of musical material; that is not what the new style was about. You could play the tracks in a random order and the disc would be just as strong. What the music does have is an extraordinary attention to detail, to producing and listening to small sounds and noises as they occur in the present. Yes, there are passages when the music speeds up or slows down, gets denser or rougher, or when the volume increases or falls back into silence. But none of this is the working through of a structural logic, or even of a felt structure (such as the much over-used arch form, by which an improvisation starts gently, becomes loud and increasingly frenetic, and then tails off in a shorter quiet coda). The music simply ‘is’ in the moment, and the musicians react to each other’s sounds in a commendably quick and open way.

Given the instrumentation it is not surprising that string and bowed textures predominate, but not a single ‘pure’ string tone is heard across the 43 minutes. This is a music of scraping, rustling and sawing, with a fair few bumps and knocks to boot. Margarida Garcia’s electric bass gives an extra twanging harshness to the mix, while Alfredo Costa Monteiro’s accordion rasps, wheezes and rattles in such a way that it’s impossible to imagine that this instrument was originally designed to accompany folk songs. Sometimes quiet sustained sounds dominate, but these quickly give way to a busy scurrying as the music ebbs, flows and eddies on and around and then back again towards near-silence. The focus is on getting inside, expanding and transforming the textures of the sounds rather than displaying any great instrumental virtuosity. And from this intense determined exploration a strange fragmented beauty emerges.

But much of the above paragraph would adequately describe dozens of other improvised CD’s from the past 10 years. So why pick out Cesura? Objectively I don’t think there is a good reason; there are doubtless several other similarly excellent improv albums from the same era that sit forgotten on my shelves while I keep coming back to this one. But for whatever reason Cesura has come to represent for me a small moment in the history of improvised music. It’s a snapshot of a time when something new was asserting itself with a freshness and excitement that I think can still be heard in the enthusiasm of the playing with these rough woody textures. Portugal was newly emerging as a centre for radical improvisation, and ‘eai’ was still a pre-school kid, playing and experimenting with eyes and ears wide open. And I also like the fact that it doesn’t quite fit the stereotypes of the EFI/eai split. There are no electronics at all on the album; it is emphatically and delightfully acoustic. Nor does it make a big issue of its silences; yes they are there, but the music moves on quickly and isn’t afraid to become noisily abrasive at times. This was exciting stuff; new possibilities were being explored and there were no perceived ideas, no habitual gestures and no fixed rules about how these explorations might be conducted.