April 2020 music reviews, ctd
by Laurent Fairon

Passepartout Duo – Vis​-​à​-​Vis (2020)
Organon contemporaneous – Wild Breath (2020)
Clear Path Ensemble – st LP (2020)
Nikolaienko Meets Arthur Mine – Nostalgia Por Mesozóica (2020)

Passepartout Duo – Vis​-​à​-​Vis (AnyOne)
https://passepartoutduo.bandcamp.com/
Swiss marimbaphone & keyboard duo Passepartout are Nicoletta Favari & Christopher Salvito. Their music is based on high precision, Minimalist marimba and vibraphone played by Salvito and various keyboards playing by Favari, including piano, toy piano, synthesizer and modified instruments. Passepartout have been touring extensively around the world in recent years, from festivals to artists residencies, and are currently based in Shanghai after a residency in Beijing. Published by Beijing company AnyOne, the Vis​-​à​-​Vis LP features two 17mn-tracks, broken into shorter pieces on the Bandcamp page – for air play compatibility, perhaps. Passepartout favor timing and clockwork-like precision rhythms as well as unusual keyboard instruments – piano strings, toy piano and eerie, buzzing tonalities emanating from malfunctioning, hacked synthesizers. Their compositions are actually build from shorter, unrelated episodes, woven together into a varied fabric, a strategy providing a welcome dynamic to their music, especially on openning track Heartwood. The B-side Vis​-​à​-​Vis [Face to face] starts with toy piano ostinatos over a metronome rhythm, until harmonics-laden, cheap synthesizer flourishes are added and developped. The music changes around the 9mn-mark, with vibraphone and exquisite, dreamy cheap synth. Additionally, the use of re-recording in this track allows interesting arrangements and gives weight to the music.

Organon Contemporaneous – Wild Breath (Attenuation Circuit)
https://emerge.bandcamp.com/album/wild-breath
Organon Contemporaneous is Portugese composer Diogo Lopes. Wild Breath is a collection of 12 études for clarinet, musique concrète sounds, sampler and synthesizer, showing Lopes’ ambition to explore non-melodic and non-rhythmic music. Incessant collages and samples create a rather dynamic and lively music, yet each track is a coherent étude focused on a limited number of sounds, a technique Lopes calls ‘micromontagem’, and which reminded me of Pierre Schaeffer’s own 'écoute restreinte’, or focused listening, where the use of a limited number of sound sources allows the listener to focus on all the nuances and characteristics of a 'sound object’, another Schaeffer-ian concept. Indeed, the music on Wild Breath was inspired in part by musique concrète, with tracks based on short sound samples from percussion, noise or electronic sources, on the one hand, and traditional electroacoustic sound treatments like delay, filtering or backward playing, also typical from the genre, on the other hand. In these proceedings, Lopes shows a great attention to details and texture. Though only marginally present in the album, the clarinet adds an interesting counterpoint to the music, like the superb bass undertones of a slowed-down clarinet on tr. #3, or the wonderfull free jazz clarinet and malfunctioning synthesizer duet on #2. The last 2 tracks –22mns of droning synth– are completely unrelated and should have been ditched, in my opinion. Wild Breath is only partly succesful, then, but still I’m eager to hear more from this artist if he manages to improve a little on album construction. Great artwork based on a Dan Penschuck photo (feindesign.de).

Clear Path Ensemble – st LP (Cosmic Compositions)
https://cosmic-compositions.bandcamp.com/album/clear-path-ensemble
Bedroom jazz project by Cory Champion, a house and techno producer from Wellington, New Zealand, with experience as a jazz drummer in the local scene as well. These tracks are clever, graceful sampler-based recreations of jazz music of various breeds, from the Modern Jazz Quartet and Lionel Hampton’s solo vibraphone, onto Alice Coltrane’s harp, through to Herbie Hancock’s funk jazz. All the percussion is adroitly sampled and reconstructed, as is the vibraphone and harp, with occasional, real guest musicians on piano, guitar, bass, harp, etc. Featuring on most tracks on bass clarinet, Jake Baxendale is excellent throughout the album. As well as great drum programming on a couple of tracks –especially #6 Tall Shorty–, the music also includes occasional electronic outbursts and weird sounds as 2020 signposts. Indeed, the Clear Path Ensemble project is not so much a nostalgic homage to jazz from the past but a fruitful re-creation, with jazz attributes used as a source of inspiration for the electronic musician.

Nikolaienko Meets Arthur Mine – Nostalgia Por Mesozóica (Muscut)
https://muscut.bandcamp.com/album/nostalgia-por-mesozo-ica
A pair of Ukrainian electronic musicians from Kyiv teem up on this exquisite 7inch single of retro-futuristic, exotica music explorations. Arthur Mine on Arp Odyssey and Venta synthesizers, Dmytro Nikolaienko on synth percussion and sound effects produce lovely melodies in the tradition of Andrew Pekler. Three short tracks full of tropical bird songs, pseudo-ethnic percussion and ritualistic, vintage analog synth. Great production and mix by St. Petersburg musician Eugenii Fadeev aka Flaty, author of a good album of electronica on the same label in 2018 (Wrong Water – Dozen LP).