Two more releases on the Edition Friforma label.
Cut Trio with Pelletron / Dynamitron (EDITION FRIFORMA eff-013), two long free jazz-improv workouts recorded in Slovenia. Tanja Feichtmair, Cene Resnik and Urban Kusar get their effects with just one alto sax, one tenor sax, and a drumkit. A lot of energy compacted into the non-stop crosstalk from these two bells, and what I would label “rolling” percussion where the drummer sees life as an endless cascade down from the top of a steep hill. Feichtmair is Austrian and I think the other two players might be Slovenian; in this very European slant on free jazz, it’s interesting how there’s a streak of darkness lurking somewhere in the high-spirited and very expressive playing, as if the simple joy of music always had to be tempered with an awareness of the sorrows of the world.
On Living Bridges (eff-014), we have the meeting of two major “vibrating” types, Samo Kutin and Pascal Battus. Slovenian Kutin shook our bones and sinews in 2020 with his record on the Zavod Sploh label as he wheeled out his modified hurdy-gurdies and home-made devices. Battus, French improviser, does many things with guitars and other devices on his table, but for me is forever cemented with the technique of playing “rotating surfaces” as he did on Ichnites in 2010 with Christine Abdelnour. I’ve never seen him do it in person but always hope that he uses something akin to a “Lazy Susan” cake-stand and a tiny rotary engine, besides contact mics and skewers.
Natch, when these two “grinding guys” got together in 2022 – incidentally recording the encounters in an old stable and inside a cave – we can expect the sawdust to start flying. Unfortunately it doesn’t, and most of this record is slow and unadventurous, disappointing to a violent fiend such as myself who wanted the experience of a sawmill with gigantic circular saws and freshly cut two-by-fours shooting out of the door, narrowly missing the head of some Canadian colossus. What I’d like is Kutin’s barely-working wooden devices to fall apart as the strings are loosened and he struggles to recover the situation, but here he seems as sedate as a farmer driving his well-oiled cart. Even so, there are many subtle textures and variations to enjoy in these non-stop drones created by the above instrumentation, plus the acoustic resonators of Kutin and the cymbals of Battus creating that familiar coppery taste, except it appears in your ears instead of your mouth. Endless tension, very immersive, but sadly not abounding with much sublimation or release.
Both the above from 27 March 2023.