Starting with their critically-acclaimed debut, ‘Zero, released in the year 2000, the duo of pianist Carolyn Hume and drummer Paul May has produced seven albums on Leo Records, mixing unusually sensitive, rhapsodic even, free improv with intensely percussive, often drum and bassy, rhythms. It’s a very singular sound and no-one else has really followed it, although for a while the jazziness of jungle was a much vaunted trend, with Pat Metheny getting it on with Goldie and Spring Heel Jack providing the missing link between Everything But the Girl and Evan Parker, both of whom they worked with. There’s also a kind of science fiction, J.G. Ballard, vibe to Hume and May’s very distinctive oeuvre, reflected in some of the album titles: ‘By Lakes Abandoned’, ‘Flames Undressed By Water’, ‘Wet Map’.
‘Shape of the Night’ continues their resolute style, in which an almost pointillist landscape of ethereally indefinite, very spare-sounding piano figures is given the counterweight of a bit of heavy welly from May’s kit-drums. The precise acuity of their attitude to sound really is something to hear, as every single brassy ring of a cymbal’s graded circumference seems to communicate clearly, while Hume’s minimalist approach to melody means that mere fragments or half-formed repetitions take on an almost mythic significance, such is the ocean of near-silence surrounding them.
The first two tracks of ’Shape of the Night’ exemplify the hard-won virtues of these chosen methods. The opener, ‘Fatal’, with Hume playing acoustic piano, seconded by a subtle synth-wash background, is so slow in tempo that the nine-minute long piece might qualify as durational, while May on the kit plus what the sleeve lists as “intimate metals” gives it the full shake, rattle and roll. By contrast, the second track, ‘Bill and Marty’, begins with May’s repeated brushes-on-snare jungle rhythms, setting up a trance-like atmospheric background that becomes the very effective setting for Hume’s oblique, chordal contributions on a Rhodesy electric keyboard. On the closing title track, they are joined by Duke Garwood on vocals, and the guitarist Berndt Rest plays on ‘Poison Melody’. It’s odd and very addictive.
