CD "Tenderness of Stones"
The strength of this album is that it holds the perfect middle between extremely conscious micro-tonal sound exploration, improvisation and composition, freedom and abstract sound versus structure and composition, words and sounds, with a natural feeling of inspiration with a strong relation between all these mentioned aspects. This is not just free music to explore or to keep balance between breaking apart and synthesis, but is constantly building up, developing as well as concluding, constructive and creative in all its details. It is immense the range used of the instrument, the bodily consciousness over the sax, to produce its sounds, which differ from sounds on the edge of breathing into it, sorts of rhythmic breathings in it, talking with it, breaths as if the sax is a pipe/ pump, tapping breaths sounds and so on, to melodic touches, always used with subtlety and at the right moments. Also the range of Lauren’s voice is huge, from poetry reciting, breathing and throat-singing capacities; I even heard her singing with double voice with perfect overtone harmonies to the sax sounds, communicative to the compositions and words, (three poems of Michael Speier were used by her) as well as being conscious of the sound buildings. To this, the sounds have been enriched with improvisations by Michael Walz on electronics and sampling, with soft dusty noise, ticking and motor-like, or radio-wave like, nice in harmony with the development of the compositions. This mature album is much more than free music, deserves to be heard and could eventually widen people’s scope of tastes.
Progressive, Reviews of expanded Jazz
TERMINE
