On Crustal Movement (CIRCUM-DISC / LIBRA RECORDS CIRCUM-LIBRA 206) we have the great Ikue Mori joining forces with Kaze – a quartet of players with an equal balance of Japanese and French players.
Ikue Mori famed for many things – the group Death Ambient for one, formed in the mid-1990s and somehow managing to include giants Fred Frith and Kato Hideki. But her career reaches back to No Wave in New York where around 1977 she drummed for DNA with Arto Lindsay. Plus there’s the John Zorn connection leading to a plethora of recordings (some solo) for Tzadik, and any time after 1999 her name on the front of a CD is a guarantee of percussive firestorms…although on this French record she plays electronics, not drums. I see she’s teamed up with Kaze before on Sand Storm (around 2020) though not sure we heard that one. The affair obviously worked out well enough for the group to have another stab and try this experiment, a file-sharing thing resulting from global lockdown conditions, except there’s an added twist since Peter Orins (drummer) and Christian Pruvost (trumpet) elected to take submitted recordings from the Japanese players into a live gig, play them over the PA, and perform along with them there to the plaudits of the troops.
This approach kinda bucks the trend for a file-sharing escapade, where the expected protocol is that you add your parts one at a time in the studio. So there’s a nifty live-versus-prerecorded tension going down here, I guess, but not enough tension for me on this rather sleepy record. Oh, I like the combinations of two trumpets, piano and drums with the fuzzy but muscular emanations from Ikue Mori’s electric coffee-mills, and the brass players in particular are going for the most “human” sound they can muster – encouraging their bells to talk and chatter like ducklings, rather than play conventional solos. This record may not have the dissonance or force of early Ikue Mori records, but for sheer invention and subtle tones, you can’t beat the glistening pearls she’s laying down on ‘Rolle Cake’, nor the ghost-besotten thought bubbles that teem in the mansion throughout the title track – 10:21 mins of poltergeist activity realised as sound.
The set is mostly rather sedate for my tastes, though the gang do manage to ruffle a few feathers and hoover up the particles on ‘Shifting Blocks’. In places, and in method, somewhat reminiscent of the music we used to get from Günter Müller and his label For4Ears. 6th March 2023.