Recorded at Munich’s ‘schwere reiter’ performance space in February 2022, this inspired duo album reunites the extraordinary Catalan pianist Jordina Millà live in Munich with the equally inventive double bassist Barry Guy, a heroic figure from the first generation of UK free improvisers, along with Evan Parker, Derek Bailey et al.
The first thing to say about the recording (engineered superbly by Zoro Babel), apart from its incredible presence and clarity, is the sheer variety of sounds the players produce, both separately and together. The second thing to note is that there’s barely a dull or by rote-seeming moment in the entire hour of its duration. Such is the restless – and relentless – progression of what could be considered a super-intense process of aural mark-making, the six separately listed (from Part 1 to Part 6) pieces comprising the overall concert fairly fly by. Whether or not any edits were made to restructure the actual live recording is unclear. If not, wow, for there is a real sense of coherence to the whole.
On one level the content of the pieces is familiar: Viennese-sounding abstract squiggles over a strikingly wide dynamic range, with the piano’s more conventional keyboard voicings intersected by a complex lexicon of sound-sources from the double bass, from eery glissandi to fiercely percussive pizzicato flurries, various bowed effects and your actual knock-on-wood percussion. Millà is as expert at playing with the piano’s interior as she is with the external keys, and there’s a real harp-in-a-box feel to proceedings, even if it can sometimes sound like the harp is being systematically destroyed from within as it plays.
Barry Guy’s sensitivity to sound is as legendary as his versatility (he has a parallel career in classical ensembles, specialising in the baroque), and he brings all his half century and more’s experience to bear on this recording. Both players appear to have an almost telepathic alertness to each other’s role in the process of co-creativity. This is especially apparent in the way individual movements are resolved, often very beautifully but sometimes just left hanging or stopped dead, without any feeling of programmatic premeditation. There’s still the odd episode where they sound like nothing so much as rats in an attic, but that comes with the territory. No pain, no gain.
