Hard for my ligaments to get a grasp on Avenue Azure, whose wispy music on this self-titled release (ENSEMBLE KLANG RECORDS #13) is slow and diffuse, but that’s probably entirely the point of this album of “almost-songs” as its creators like to describe it. Actually the vocals of Saskia Lankhoorn, a Dutch pianist sometimes heard in jazz circles, are just one element in the soap-dish which is also strung with electronic effects, and the strange gestures and suggestions which drift out of Peter Harden’s guitar. While this lug-owner prefers the ambiguity and mystery-equations of ‘Cyane’s Message’, more picnic-loving friends may derive a grain of sand from the languid stretches of ‘River Chorale’. In theme at least, a watery tune like that seems to hark back to the Sky Records label and Hans-Joachim Roedelius of the 1980s, but even his gentler utterances sound positively muscular next to these gauzy strands.
If these two players have an agreed set of boundaries, I think the fleeting melodic-harmonic moments have been assigned to the pianist and chanteuse, while the guitarist (who studied with Louis Andriessen, so can’t be all bad) reserves the atonal and experimental tone-rows for himself and his “axe”, said instrument having first been dipped in butter and mashed potatoes. But that’s an oversimplification. Avenue Azure themselves are settling for landscape painting in sound, and hoping for an atmospheric billow or two in the air, but also hope to “shroud the listener in a dark comfort”, much like my own experience when I go to bed with a black hot water bottle. Look out for more of Harden’s playing with Ensemble Klang in the Netherlands. (28/04/2023)