TERMINE DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHIE & PRESSESPIEGEL PRESSESPIEGEL BY SIMON ADAMS BY BRIAN MORTON, THE WIRE PROGRESSIVE POTSDAMER NEUESTE NACHRICHTEN, 11.01.06 MÄRKISCHE ALLGEMEINE, 10.01.06 BY NILS JACOBSON BY RICHARD COCHRANE BY CHRIS KELSEY, ALL MUSIC GUIDE BY JOHN CRATCHLEY, JAZZWISE, JULY 01 BY DAN WARBURTON MY WAY KARL LIPPEGAUS, STEREO 8/ 99 WOLFGANG WINTER, BADISCHES TAGBLATT 24.08.09 KLAAS BÜKER, NEUE WESTFÄLISCHE ZEITUNG 25.11.08 TSCHEBOKSARY (RUSSISCHE FÖDERATION) OKTOBER 08 SVETLANA GORDEJEVA, TSCHEBOKSARY OKTOBER 08 THOMAS ROHDE, RHEIN-ZEITUNG 07.01.02 NÜRTINGER ZEITUNG, 09.11.06 BADISCHE NEUESTE NACHRICHTEN, 21.11.06The framework of the album is Michael Speier’s poem Wasser Und Licht – which in four different translations (three in English, one in Japanese) furnishes the lyrics for the release – yet without ever being presented in its original form, a shadow once removed, a Platonic Form to the album itself. The Japanese version is performed by its translation, Koho Mori.
The music is assembled around three axes – Gies sometimes idiosyncratic horn playing duels, dances, conspires with, caresses and makes love with Newton’s astoundingly vast range of vocal techniques, tonalities, timbres and emotional valencies.
The third axis is the textural electronics that provides a sketchy bedrock for most of the tracks, without ever overwhelming the primary performers. Percussive elements (which may have been electronically generated) round out the sound palette.
The range of this music presented is incredible. Gies and Newton are able to be gentle and atmospheric (at times both performers create an intimacy that hearing makes one feel almost naked); yet they are also able to entire into incredibly technical flurries of notes, wild chaotic sprees which nevertheless retain an arc spirit of self-control.
At other points the music becomes dark and music, the sax treated to become like a low-set reptilian dancer; Newton’s voice ranges from the lofty clouds of jazz scat virtuosity down into luxurious throat-singing, frenetic scatting and inhuman whispering and hissing. She even seems to have invented what could only be called “noise beatboxing”!
In general what captivates is the performers’ ability to traverse so many moods and atmospheres. They make themselves more than fit vessels for the creative spark that seeks to burst from this album’s seams.
Speier’s poem, a kind of animistic meditation on the fleeting yet eternal beauty of the moment in nature, is combined and recombined throughout the album to create a kind of perennial avatar which emerged, dissolves and recombines again and again, sparking off radically different performances throughout this process.
Gies and Newton hold the fragility of the moment with a tender and sure strength. You can hear an instinctive and unspoken connection between them, a shared capacity to submit to the beautiful discipline of expression that they courted with this release.
In transmuting Speier’s words both lyrically and musically they succeed in opening the listener into a direct experience of how many seeds and riches there are lurking in every word we speak or thought we entertain.
This release is a kind of celebration (and revelation) of the sacred that eternally conceals itself – in plain view – before our all-too-human awareness. Musically sophisticated and philosophically profound.
