Produced for sale at UnicaZürn’s incredible IKLECTIK performance earlier this year, this thirty-minute CD-R features three live improvisations that are totally in the zone without edits nor overdubs.
A lightness of touch that breathes plenty, lures you towards this mini-album’s fourteen-minute centrepiece “AZ /\ ZA”, a velveteen-vexed flood for the senses, shimmer-shot in snaking Popol Vuh-like sabres and padded percussives. A fleshy four-pointed dynamic whose chemistry is fluidly reactive, caught in the burn of the moment, swerving with suggestion. An invisible city figure-skating in corkscrewed trajectories, lantern-chasing its echoic shadows. Those sticky notes burning through, mutating, insistently rubbing then bubbling over, to mirage twist in rubberised beats and charnel curls.
A sulking magnificence well worth the entry fee alone, haemorrhaging into the five-minute “Abyssal” that floats out on an opalescent fretwork — a duel of effect-roasted sitars, pinned together by the lightest touch of tabla. A stretchy sketch-like presence that darts between your ears and succinctly ends this tantalising glimpse of things to come.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-