Both synthesiser specialist Andreas Tilliander and trumpeter Goran Kajfeš have been playing and recording for the best part of twenty-five years, so bring much experience and sensitivity to this unique collaboration.
The album draws the two worlds of jazz and electronic ambience into one natural whole, and over eight submerged, cavernous tracks floats glimmering sparks and sultry smears of trumpet above an ever-evolving electronic soundscape. With track titles evoking lunar landscapes and the album title a tip of the cap to Terry Riley‘s In C, this music is about exploration, distance and atmosphere (or lack of), evoking solitude and splendour.
A gentle heartbeat opens things up with a sinuous bass and swirls of electronics. There is a distorted funkiness at play, but shimmering in a haze with sounds coming and going. The trumpet wavers around the settled beat and gives an oddly exotic feel, but it is also dub-like in the use of echo and space as if recorded in a cave discovered on the moon. There is an African feel to “More Than Worlds”, but as if seen through a stranger’s eyes with the trumpet more romantic and the sensations more sultry. This is the sound of travel; of ideas welcomed and subsumed with the constant throb of bass and the uncluttered ambience evoking a blanket of stars seen through the chill of night.The trumpet hints at cool players of yore but the setting is fresh and intriguing, offering a new home for these warm utterances. The use of analogue and digital synths gives a slight ebb and flow to the proceedings, insinuating in one direction and then another, the movement viscous yet continuous. On the LP, the songs subtly merge as if this were a carefully compiled mix where the electronics gently change the angle of approach and the trumpet uses this as an opportunity to try another voice, changing character with an almost wah-wah effect on “Nef Argo” that sits against a lachrymose backing and sees out the first side.
There is something elusive about the sound, as if it is being heard through mirrors or seen with mistaken glances. Like a receding tide on a deserted beach, only the lucky few have the ability to experience this, removed from normal life and transplanted to a hidden world. There are points like on “Bending Things” where the trumpet seems to be accompanied by other horns; but really this is just part of Andreas’s ever-expanding arsenal of effects. Where Goran’s wild melody lines disappear echoing into the aether, they are shuffled aside by an array of unnatural and natural sounds. Towards the end, things turn resigned with the almost invisible distorted lifeboats of “Moss” adrift in a vast expanse of sea, while closer “Twozerozerofive” is like a requiem. As the electronics break down and disperse, so the trumpet too becomes fleeting, attempting to escape as the song gradually dissolves leaving us reeling and a little bereft.In Cmin is a lovely collaboration, pushing two styles together and coming out with something utterly unexpected; a sonorous journey from start to finish.
-Mr Olivetti-
